SEO Says: Get Your Sitemap on Google!
You can not ignore Sitemaps if you want to increase your page rank and link popularity. Often neglected, a Sitemap is an important file that represents and contains the entire structure of your web site or blog.
In addition to helping your visitors, search engines will lap up your site map like a fat kid would a chocolate cupcake.
I’m going to show you how to easily generate a sweet tasting Sitemap for your WordPress blog and tempt hungry search engines like Google to take a look at what’s cooking on your blog!
In November 2006, the fat cats at the three top search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) came together to create an industry standard for Sitemaps for all websites. Without getting all technical, you can conform your blog to these standards in less than 15 minutes if you follow the simple steps below.
Install the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin
- Download the plugin here
- Place it in your wp-content/plugins directory
- Create and upload two files to the root directory of your site named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz
- Make these files writable by viewing their info and checking the writable option (CHMOD 666)
- Activate the plugin on the WordPress plugin administration page
- Edit the settings of the plugin by selecting Settings > XML-Sitemap and build the sitemap the first time
- That’s it! The plugin will automatically update your site map when you publish any new posts from now on
Notify Google
Google Webmaster Tools, is a resource that everyone with a web site should visit. This is where you can add your Sitemap to Google and have them verify that it’s all okay. If it’s not, you will be guided through some simple troubleshooting steps until you get it right.
2 Facts you might not have known
- Sitemap files have a limit of 50,000 URLs and 10 megabytes in size
- Sitemap.org was put together by three competitors
