WordPress & Google XML Sitemaps
Posted under: One of the most important element in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to have your site indexed properly (and regularly) by popular search engines.
As of today, Google has a significantly huge market share of 84.96% (resource) and is definitely hard for website owners to ignore.
I’m going to walk you through on how I generated XML Sitemaps for adorr.net (powered by WordPress) and submit the sitemap to Google for in-depth crawling.
Before we proceed further, I would assume that your site is running on WordPress, as per stated in this post title.
Generate Google XML Sitemap
First of all, you will need to download WordPress Google XML Sitemaps plugin and install it on your WordPress site. If you haven’t know how to install WordPress plugin, check out the steps here.
** Do note that if your WordPress has Multisite feature turned on, follow this instruction instead!
Once you’ve got the plugin installed and activated, browse to Settings > XML-Sitemaps
Look out for a link button to “build the sitemap” for the first time. If you get a permission error, check the file permissions of the plugin files.
The plugin will then automatically generate the XML Sitemap file. Mine is located at http://adorr.net/sitemap.xml (default location is on your root, unless you changed it, check the value under “Location of your sitemap file”)
The next time you want to rebuild the sitemap, click on the link button “Rebuild the sitemap” on top of the plugin page.
This is, however, optional since by default the option “Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog” is checked.
XML Sitemap to Google
Next, login to your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you haven’t own one, free registration is just a few steps away.
On post-login page, click on “Add a site…” button and type in your domain name.
** Make sure you have a consistent domain, e.g. www.adorr.net or adorr.net, since they are treated differently. If you need an idea on how to make this happen, check out my another post on this.
There’s a simple validation process, where you are required to add in an additional metadata onto your site header, within <head> tag.
It should look similar to mine as shown below (except that with different content value, of course):
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="xoS99zieD3E8wqSqd-QFQmEyMKUEU9nyf36F0_m5lNw" />
Once done, browse to “your site” > Site Configuration > Sitemaps, click on “Submit a Sitemap” button and type in your sitemap file and location (it’s sitemap.xml by default, unless you changed it in previous steps when generating sitemap)
It usually takes 5 – 15 seconds for Google to download your sitemap file and digest.
If everything goes smoothly up to this point, you shall leave the rest to Google Bot to crawl your site
Last but not least
There are a few other tools that you may find it useful, e.g. Crawl stats, Site performance, but I’ll leave that to you to discover.
Hope these simple steps will help you a little, if not much, on your site’s SEO.
Cheers!
Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!
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