There are a lot of factors that affect how the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc) rank your site in their search results for your keywords. A tip for bloggers who want to have their site ranked well, especially within Google, is to create a sitemap and then have this uploaded to Google and other major search engines.
Why are sitemaps important? Here is what Google says about it:
“Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages”
Apart from this, sitemaps also allow you to easily tell the search engines about updates to your blog. Obviously search engines aren’t going to immediately re-index your blog when you update your sitemap but they will allow for easier and quicker re-indexing of your blog. If your blog is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success.
These days Google uses a new format for sitemaps so it won’t actually do to just create another page or .html sitemap, you need to create an XML sitemap.
The great thing for bloggers that use Wordpress is that you can get a plug-in that will allow you to create and regenerate XML sitemaps automatically. The plugin is called Google Sitemap Generator (don’t worry, you can use the same sitemap to submit to other search engines like Yahoo, MSN & Ask.com) and this can be downloaded here.
Here is how you use this plugin:
- Firstly, install the plugin (into wp-content/plugins) and activate (of course!)
- Then click on Options in Wordpress and then Sitemap
- Next you will need to manually create two files using something like Windows Notepad - the files are called sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz - don’t put anything in these files, they should just be blank
- Then upload/FTP these files into your blog host account in the root directory (where ever your index.php file is.. it should be in the /www or /public_html folder)
- Then you will need to change the properties on these files. Most FTP clients allow you to right click on the files and change properties or CHMOD. Change properties to 666
- Then, go back to WP-Admin to your Sitemap page, & click on Rebuild Sitemap. You should get a message that tells you that the two files, sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz were successfully created.
- You can change options on this page as well - a recommendation is actually not to ping Google each time your site changes as if you make lots of changes you can actually get penalised from Google for pingSPAM.
- Now you want to tell Google you have a new sitemap and to do this you go to Google Webmaster Tools
- Basically add your blog (if its not already there), go to the Sitemap Option & add your sitemap.. you should just simply type sitemap.xml in the field and click add
- If you did everything right, you should see your sitemap listed there and a message from Google saying it was a success but that it would take several hours to reindex your site and thanks for your patience!
Note: the creator of the Google Sitemap Generator plugin has released a new beta version that will also allow you to upload your sitemap to Ask.com and Yahoo (although you will need an Application ID for this).
2 responses so far ↓
1 Scott Clark // Jul 25, 2007 at 12:37 pm
It’s worth bringing up that not all search marketers agree with the use of xml sitemaps. Some even feel that it hurts your rank. I’m sort of in the middle. In many cases it hides poor site crawlability, and therefore often poor design.
I can see that some dynamic and otherwise cranky site structures we might want to feed the engines more directly, but not always.
If possible, the site should be naturally discoverable without a site map by virtue of good design and categorization. I am now producing HTML sitemaps only (sometimes via rewrite rules,) and it has helped me a great deal in discovering crawl issues that an XML site map would have hidden from me. I think that’s the way I’m going from here on out on most sites. It definitely seems to have helped rank.
2 admin // Jul 25, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Hi Scott
Interesting point. I haven’t actually seen any controversy around sitemaps. Since right now Google is not accepting HTML sitemap submissions, I would have thought all search marketers would be behind creating XML sitemaps.
I’ll do some more research on the matter & may create a separate post about it.
Col
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