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.

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The first step in optimising your BLOG to be search engine friendly is to update your permalink structure(your BLOG URLs)

This tutorial will show you how to update your Permalink Structure

1. Check your current Permalink Structure

The first thing to do is click on a post and look at the page title in the address bar. Does is it resemble something like this http://**your blog address**/?p=121 if so then you are using the default permalink structure and the first thing we must do is change this.

2. Log in to Site Admin

Log-in into you BLOG back-end with your admin password

3. Go to Permalinks Tab

Go to Options then Permalinks

4. Change Permalink Structure

If you have not configured your Permalinks structure then will more than likely be sitting at the default setting which is: Default http://**your blog address**/?p=123 (Or something similar).

This setting allows Word-press to dictate what your page title will be and usually means your page title ends with a lot of numbers and characters at the end.

Whilst this works fine it doesn’t really make them very search engine friendly The first thing we are going to do is create a custom structure (click custom structure) to make our page titles more search engine friendly and easy to work with. I suggest using the following structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ as this will keep your page title fairly small and allow it to be found in search engines.

5. Update Permalink Structure

Click Update Permalink Structure to save these settings.

6. Confirm BlOG is using new Permalink Structure

Now view your blog and you should now find your page titles of your posts have changed and look something like this http://**your blog address**/2007/08/tutorial-windows-2003-cd-based-server-image/ notice it is now nice and easy to read without all the strange characters at the end.

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

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Are you looking to allow your readers to subscribe to a single category of your Word-press BLOG or only posts relating to certain categories, if so this tutorial may be able to help.

1. Update Permalink Structure

The first step is to update the Permalink structure of your Word-press BLOG by using this Permalink Structure tutorial.

2. Work out Category feed address

Assuming you have setup categories and are attaching all your posts to one or more categories we can work out the category feed for a specific category. If you have not setup categories and have not linked your posts to a category I suggest you do that now by logging in as admin and editing your posts. Whilst in the word-press post editor you will notice a categories field on the right hand side start ticking the categories that the post relates too. If a suitable category does not exist then simple add a new one.

With your categories setup and posts linked to suitable categories we can now work out the category feed address for a specific category by viewing your blog and clicking on a category. This should display all the posts for that category. Notice the page title in the address bar it should look something like this http://blog.mcdermotts.org.uk/category/windows-2003/to create a category feed for that category you simply append /feed/ at the end so it now looks like http://blog.mcdermotts.org.uk/category/windows-2003/feed/ and hey presto that is the feed address for readers to subscribe to only that category.

Your readers can now add that address into any RSS reader and automatically receive new posts from that specified category. See it in action on McDermotts

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