Sitemaps for your Wordpress-Blog

Does your blog have a sitemap? If you want your blog to rank well in searchengines, you will definitely need a sitemap, or better two sitemaps. One in XML and one in HTML.

What is a sitemap
A sitemap generally is a list of links to all pages of your website. It helps visitors (the HTML) or searchengines (the XML) to access all of your site´s pages.

HTML Sitemap

A sitemap in HTML is for both, visitors and searchengines. It might look something like this:

• Category: Blogging
  • Linktrains - good or evil? September 7th, 2007
  • Committing to blog regularly September 3rd, 2007
  • Finally, it is mine August 31st, 2007

You can see an example of my sitemap here.

A visitor can go to this sitemap and find a complete list of your site´s pages and easily access them with just one click.
The same goes for searchengines, their crawlers will access your sitemap and, follow the links they will find there and then index every single page.

A HTML-Sitemap should be linked on your homepage. In WordPress you could create a Page to put your sitemap on, like I did. (See top of this page) Why? Imagine, some of your pages are stored somewhat deep in your site´s hierarchy and a visitor might have to click several times in your navigation to reach it. Google will give a lower authority to this page as it appears not very important being on the 4^th or 5^th level. Having a link to the sitemap on your frontpage will take it closer to the top of your site´s hierarchy and a searchengine will consider it to be more important.

In Wordpress, an HTML-Sitemap can easily be created by a plugin you can download here: www.dagondesign.com

Installation is just as simple:

• Download the .zip-file and uncompress
• Upload the entire dd-sitemap-gen folder (not just the files inside) to your plugins directory
• Activate the plugin in your administration panel
• Configure the plugin in the options panel (under DDSitemapGen)
• Simply add the following line to a WordPress page (where you would like the sitemap to display):

<!-- ddsitemapgen -->

Note: For those of you using the new rich-text editor - be sure to click the ‘html’ button to edit the page source directly. Otherwise Wordpress will wrap code tags around the line which generates the sitemap and it will not work properly.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is only for searchengines, not for your visitors. They will probably never see it. An XML sitemap gives searchengines a complete lists of URLs of every single page on your site. Same as with the HTML so far. Your XML sitemap might look something like this:

<urlset>
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.marcorichter.net/</loc>
  <lastmod>2007-09-02T07:16:03+00:00</lastmod>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  <priority>1</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

As you can see, this is not really readable to a normal user. Have a look at my XML sitemap, if you like to see the whole XML-File.

There is another plugin which will create you sitemap for you. Download it from Arne Brachhold.

Installation is again very easy:

Simply download the Zip-Archive and extract all files into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then go into your WordPress administration page, click on Plugins and activate it. After that you will have a new menu point called “Sitemap” under the “Options” menu. You can alter the default change frequencies, filename and other options there. Click once on “Rebuild Sitemap” to create your sitemap the first time.

The script needs write access to your Blog directory. Check out the WordPress Codex or have a look at the Plugin´s FAQ for help.

How to get your XML sitemap into Google
You will need to create an account with Google Webmaster Tools. On your first login, you will be prompted for your site´s URL. Add the URL and follow the instruction to verify you have lawful control over that site. (That´s easy).
After verfication there will be a link Manage http://www.yourdomain.com, click here and enter the URL of your new XML sitemap. If you use the plugin, this should be http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. That´s it, you are in. Google might take a few hours to get the data for the first time.

Note: Google will check back for updates on your sitemap, so there is no need to resubmit it.

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sitemap, seo, wordpress

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