Tutorial: Wordpress SEO Step 2 - Google Sitemap

Posted by admin on August 30th, 2007

Want to improve your search engine visibility for your Word-press BLOG ? If so follow this tutorial to create a Google Sitemap

Google Sitemaps will improve your search engine visibility by allowing Google-bots to crawl your blog easily and quickly keeping it up-to date with new posts and comments on your BLOG.

The easiest way to create a Google Sitemap is to follow this procedure:

1. Download the Plug-in

The plug-in can be found here

2. Upload to your Plug-in Folder

Unzip the folder and then ftp the unzipped folder to your plug-ins folder on your web-space

3. Verify Plug-in has been installed

Log-in to your BLOG’s site admin and goto the Plug-in Management page. You should be able to see your newly installed plug-in called “Google Sitemaps

4. Activate the Plug-in

Activate the plug-in by clicking activate. If successful the status should now show Deactivate to indicate it has been activated ok.

5. Configure Sitemap

Go to Options and then Sitemap. From here you can configure the sitemap to include additional pages or specify the location of where the sitemap.xml file will be created.

6. Build Sitemap

Once you have happily configured the plug-in simple click “Rebuild Sitemap” If successful at the top of the page you will three messages saying:

Successfully built sitemap file:
- URL: http://**yourdomainname**/sitemap.xml
- Path: /home/fhlinux165/b/**yourdomainname**/user

/htdocs/sitemap.xml

Successfully built gzipped sitemap file:
- URL: http://**yourdomainname**/sitemap.xml.gz
- Path: /home/fhlinux165/b/**yourdomainname**/user

/htdocs/sitemap.xml.gz

Successfully pinged Google at

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap

=http%3A%2F%2F**yourdomainname**%2Fsitemap.xml.gz

Congratulations you have now generated your google sitemap and are on your way to search engine visibility for your BLOG.

7. Submit Sitemap with Google

The final step is to submit your Google Sitemap with Google. This is done by logging into your Google Webmaster Tools account Click on your site which you have added to your dashboard (if you haven’t added your site you will need to do this first, and then verify the site - see the instructions within Google webmaster tools as to how to do this). Then click the Sitemaps tab and Add Sitemap. Once submitted it will probably take Google a while to update.

That’s it ! well done if you got to this point your on your way to better SEO !

Keep watching for step three in the Word-press SEO series.

Bad Behavior has blocked 442 access attempts in the last 7 days.