If search engine optimization is important to you, you probably already know about Google Sitemaps.
Google thinks sitemaps are important:
Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in crawling and indexing your pages, but there are many other factors that influence the crawling/indexing processes. Sitemaps lets you tell us information about your pages (which ones you think are most important, how often the pages change), so you can have a voice in these subsequent steps. Other factors include how many sites link to you, if your content is unique and relevant, if we can crawl the pages successfully, and everything outlined in our webmaster guidelines.
To make this work, you have to create a sitemap file, a special XML document. For most people, this is not very easy.
Luckily, it is if you have a a WordPress blog.
Last year, Arne Brachhold developed the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plug-in which I discovered only recently. This automatically generates a Google Sitemaps-compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
Once you upload that file to your Google Sitemaps account, you’re on your way to helping Google index and crawl your site better which may result in a more complete index of the site.
Neat.
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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
