Yesterday, I set out to make sure everything was running smoothly with my blog, which included minor changes to theme files as well as a little search engine indexing maintenance. Recently, I had switched over to WordPress and wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on in the search engines. Low and behold (as much as I should have figured this was going to happen), my sitemap was broken and needed to be fixed immediately so search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! can index my site better.

What is a sitemap?

Well, young grasshopper, a sitemap or “site index” is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers (that’s the search engine) or users (that’s you!). What this does is allow search engines to know which pages of your website you want included in search results, the URLs to those pages, and how often they’re updated. More than likely, your website will still be crawled and indexed without the use of a sitemap, but it is an industry standard to have one created for each website as it not only provides a mechanism for search engines to discover more of the content on your site, but also acts as a navigation aid by providing an overview of your website’s content at a single glance.

Websites built in Flash…

Sitemaps are a useful tool for making sites built in Adobe Flash and other non-html languages more searchable. If a website’s navigation is built with Flash, the initial homepage of a site developed in this way will probably be found by search engines. However, the subsequent pages are unlikely to be found without the use of a sitemap.

How can I generate a sitemap?

If you are using WordPress, I suggest using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold. This plugin will generate a sitemap for you to better index your blog. It also supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

If you’re not using WordPress, I suggest using the Sitemap Generator at xml-sitemaps.com. This will crawl through all the pages of your website and create a sitemap that you can upload to your website.

What are the next steps?

I like to use Google Webmaster Tools at google.com. You have to have a Google Account (which is free), submit your website and verify it by including a meta tag in the homepage’s source code. However, once you have been verified as the owner, you can specify the URL of your sitemap and Google will keep it on file to help with their indexing. Additionally, Google Webmaster Tools also displays your top search queries, links to your website, keywords and more.

Tags: Awesome, WordPress, XML