Why Add a Sitemap?
I’ll be honest and say that I don’t believe sitemaps improve your ranking in search engines. However, they do make sure more pages get indexed and that they get indexed more quickly. This article presents evidence that the difference is astounding:
- Google with a sitemap: 14 minutes
- Google without a sitemap: 1375 minutes
- Yahoo with a sitemap: 245 minutes
- Yahoo without a sitemap: 1773 minutes
How to Add a Sitemap to Your WordPress Site
- Step 1: Click here to download the latest version of “Google XML Sitemaps”. Click the orange “Download” button in the top-right corner..
- Step 2: Extract the files into a folder on your desktop. The folder will be called “google-sitemap-generator”
- Step 3: Login to your site’s files via FTP and navigate to /wp-content/plugins/.
- Step 4: Upload the “google-sitemap-generator” folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
- Step 5: You’ll now need to back up to two directories until you reach your main WordPress folder. You should be able to see at least three folders (wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes). You’ll need to create two files here with these names:
- sitemap.xml
- sitemap.xml.gz
- Step 6: Go to wp-admin >> Plugins and click “Activate” under “Google XML Sitemaps”
- Step 7: Now under “Google XML Sitemaps” you’ll see an option called “Settings”. Click on that:
- Step 8: At the top of the new page you should see this message: “The sitemap wasn’t built yet. Click here to build it the first time.” I probably don’t need to tell you what to do here 🙂
Submitting the Sitemap to Search Engines
Your sitemap will now be located at: http://example.com/sitemap.xml This is the address you can use to submit to search engines:
- Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
- Tahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
- Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster
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