Plugins in Use @ Moondance: Google XML Sitemaps

Posted by Michelle Petit-Sumrall as Blogging, Plugins, Wordpress

So far, much of what we have discussed involved getting your blog found on search engines and keeping it clean of spam. There’s one more plugin that will help you get popular: Google XML Sitemap.

This plugin is a little more difficult to deal with, not in terms of installation (that, as usual, is plug and play), but in terms of actually getting it to do what it does.

So what does it do, exactly, anyway? Well, according to http://www.sitemaps.org/

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

In other words, this form of sitemap is designed to help search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com) find your site (or, in this case, your blog), and make a listing of the pages on said site.

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin is designed to create an XML sitemap simply and easily, without you having to know a single thing about XML. Once installed, you will need to go to its setup options (under “Settings->XML-Sitemap”) to set up the frequency at which you want your site crawled (frequencies are at the bottom of the page). Then, click “Rebuild Sitemap” to create the sitemap the first time.

Now as it sits at this point, everything is ready to go. All you have to do is let the search engines know.

Personally, I’ve worked only with Google, I would imagine it’s the same with the other search engines. It’s good to remember that search engines are a lot like modern news outlets: they pick up information from each other, which means you first go to the big boy on the block, and rather sooner or later the others will have the same information.

Even if you don’t have a Google account, you can create one by going to the Google Webmaster Tools tour page. Once you take the tour, you should be able to figure out how to submit your new sitemap (this article won’t cover those details, please use Google’s help page for more information).

Now, you can submit your site (and it’s sitemap!”) to Yahoo through the site submit<"a> page on Yahoo!, to MSN through their “Site Submit page, and Ask.com does it automatically. Actually, as I’ve said before, it isn’t necessary to do all this once you’ve done it with Google, but I’m providing this information because I know some people don’t like Google. As previously said, eventually all search engines will find you; this is merely a method for finding it faster and ensuring that your site gets indexed.

The lates version of Google XML Sitemaps actually goes you one step better: on the right hand side of the options page, there are a lot of links sending you directly to wherever you need to go to submit your sitemap to MSN, Google, and Yahoo. How easy is that? all of them will ask you to authenticate your site either by putting some meta tags in your site’s header, or by uploading a simple html file. I recommend the latter method, because this is a Wordpress-powered site. Once that is done, click the verification link, and you should be good to go! Just make sure to upload it to the “blog” folder (if you don’t know what that means, feel free to ask me, I’ll be glad to help)

And there you have it! Now, go out and be FOUND!

Related posts

• Plugins in Use @ Moondance: Wordpress Stats (0)
• Plugins in Use @ Moondance : All-in-One SEO Pack (0)
• Plugins in use @ Moondance – Akismet (0)
• Plugins in Use @ Moondance – “Add-to-Any” (2)
• Plugins (1)