Google Sitemaps
We have so far covered Permalinks and Page Titles, so now I would like to introduce a plugin called Google Sitemap Generator.
3. Google Sitemaps
The Google Sitemaps program allows webmasters and site owners to feed it pages they'd like to be included in Google's web index and the plugin I mentioned above is very useful as it auto generates these sitemaps for you.
Why you should have a sitemap for your website?
- Newly updated content will be crawled by Googlebots very quickly
- Improves search engine visibility as it will be able to go through all the pages you have created
How to use it?
1. First, download and upload the plugin to your plugin folder - Link
2. Create 2 files called sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz in your blog's base folder. CHMOD them to be writeable.
3. Activate the plugin in Wordpress
4. Goto Options->Sitemap and click on "Rebuild Sitemap" and you're done!
If you haven't signed up for an account in Google's Webmaster Tools: Sitemap, you need to do so and then follow the instructions there.
May 14th, 2006 23:29
[…] Continue to "3. Sitemap" […]
May 15th, 2006 05:09
[…] 1. Permalinks - changing your Wordpress permalinks to be search-engine friendly 2. Page Title - improve the readability of your blog posts 3. Google Sitemaps - creating a sitemap for your blog 4. Tagging & Meta Keywords - implementing tags on your blog and how to use them as meta keywords. […]
May 17th, 2006 08:51
[…] Remember my previous post about installing the Google Sitemaps generator in your Wordpress blog? Besides letting Google know when you update your post or have new content, Google Sitemaps also gives you information such as your website statistics like: […]
October 31st, 2006 12:43
how to use a sitemap for a blog in blooger.com ??
May 22nd, 2007 10:24
I'm a little bit confused..what do you meant by creating a file name under sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz? Is it a folder? Or is it just a notepad? Thanks
June 1st, 2007 09:22
Well, Mark you're right. just use notepad to create them if your server doesn't create them automatically. =)