Google sitemap XML and webmaster tools
There are a lot of things still to be done in my blog so I continue to blog in WorrdPress setup category.
I had quite long break after I started the first post here. There was quite a lot reasons for that: summer, break of my laptop and many other factors.
As I have posted 2 fresh posts recently, the step No 1 I’m going to do is tell Google that I’m back – come, crawl and index it again. For this reason I have create sitemap XML file.
Plugin “Google XML Sitemaps” for wordpress does everything what I need. It automatically creates sitemap file compliant with Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Rebuilds it every time I publish new post or make updates and notifies the search engines about it.
It’s very easy to install it:
1. Upload the directory “google-sitemap-generator” to /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Login to the blog admin, go to menu item “Plugins” – here you should find listed your plogin. Click Activate.
The line turns to green – the plugin is activated.
3. Go to menu item Settings and new submenu item “XML-Sitemap”.
4. Look if you want to change some configuration settings here and click “Update options”.
5. Click to generate the file for the first time – see the image bellow.
The status section should change into something like the image below:
6. This is it – click to link “sitemap” or “zipped” to see how looks the file.
7. I haven’t checked option “Modify or create robots.txt file in blog root which contains the sitemap location.” My choice to make it manually. Add the following line to your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://ejikas.lt/sitemap.xml.gz
8. Register to google webmasters tools and submit one of the links of your sitemap (sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz).
While the last step is optional it’s highly recommended as it will give you better understanding how google see your site and many other useful things.
Tags: Google, seo, sitemap xml