In the competitive Applicant Tracking System market, RecruitGear Express was not achieving the visibilty that we wanted. Ranking well for such general keywords as"recruiting software", "hiring software" , and "applicant tracking system" seemed impossible, so we performed keyword research using Google's Keyword Tool to determine more specific keyword phrases that would be less competitive.

Four industries were targeted: Health Care, Hospitality, Retail and Seasonal/Temporary workers. A "landing page" was added to the site for each of the industries, with graphics and text customized to that industry.

As a result, RecruitGear Express now ranks:

• #1 on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL for "online retail hiring software"
• #1 on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL for "seasonal temporary hiring software"
• #1 on Google and Yahoo for "hospitality hiring software", #2 on MSN and AOL
• #4 on Google for "health care recruiting software", #1 on MSN, #8 on Yahoo

While the traffic for those keyword phrases may be lower, the visitors who do see RecruitGear Express are more likely to be looking for the exact service that the software provides. It's better to have a high conversion rate on a small group of visitors, than a low conversion rate on a large group. Your clickthroughs and bounce rate are now being factored into your quality score by Google, to be used on both organic search results and Adwords listings.

Your goal should be the same as the search engine's goal: to get the right visitors to the right place.

I was looking for a tool/component/code to generate an xml sitemap on the fly from a SqlSitemapProvider for our new website - why invent the wheel, right? - but I didn't have much luck at first.

I found this blog post: Google Sitemaps for ASP.NET 2.0
But unfortunately you can no longer get the source code, since the author assumes that everyone is now using ASP.NET 3.5.

I also found this post, which discussed that handler and some changes to it: Generate a Google Sitemap Using ASP.NET
But that didn't have the dll or source code either.

Then I found this: Sitemaps.NET
But after setting it up, I received the "Url cannot be relative" error that other commenters were getting. Luckily James included his source code in the download. I was able to make a small change and now it works perfectly for our site.

In the WriteUrlValueElements function, I changed:

if (UrlPath.IsRelativeUrl(nodeUrl))
throw new SitemapWriterException("Url cannot be relative", siteMapNode.Key);

to:

if (UrlPath.IsRelativeUrl(nodeUrl))
nodeUrl = _siteHostUrl + "/" + nodeUrl;

That may not work for everyone, but it works just fine for me because of the way our database is set up.

I hope someone else will find this useful; here is a link to the source code and dll: sitemaps.zip