5 Steps To Optimize Sitemaps In Your Blogs

1. Before we get going on how to optimize sitemaps lets focus our little on the importance of it, why it is essential. Google doesn’t guarantee that all the urls listed in a sitemap will be indexed and shown up in their search results but that doesn’t conclude you can give less importance on this whole process, reason is Google or any other search engines never guarantee inclusion of any of your pages in the search results and its something like a disclaimer so don’t be much bothered by it.

Sitemaps helps search engines to find pages that are not normally visible to it when a search engine bot crawls through your pages, normally it happens when you have a complex navigational structure to your blog which makes it difficult for bots to find hidden pages in your blog. So submitting a sitemap with complete list of urls in your blog makes the whole process easy for the search engines to find your hidden pages, its also a good practice to make use of sitemaps even if you have blog with easy navigational sturcture, so don’t under estimate its importance.

2. Optimizing sitemaps to your blogs can be achieved to through variety of plugins that is available for free, but one of the best plugin I ever came across in wordpress is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress I never came across any other wordpress plugin dedicated for sitemaps that is being upgraded so consistently and that is down to earth easy to optimize. So I highly recommend using this plugin for your wordpress blog.

3. Once you have installed the plugin then its a fairly easy job to update your url lists, just get to the XML-sitemap setting and you will find exhaustive options on what to include in your sitemaps, priority settings etc.. you can change those options to your needs and click on build sitemap and it will automatically create one for you in the location you specified by default it will be created in the root of your url but you can change that location to your needs by altering the options.

4. Submitting sitemap to Google can be done through your webmaster tools, just login to your webmaster tools navigate to site configuration and choose sitemaps option and you will have an option to submit your sitemap there.

5. You can also alternatively submit your sitemaps through robots.txt, I have already discussed how you can edit your robots.txt file in your blog, just make sure to go through the link if you don’t know how and to submit your sitemap in robots.txt just include this

sitemap: http://yourblogurl.com/sitemap.xml

considering the fact that your sitemap is present at the root of your domain.

Related posts:

1. How To Submit Your Sitemaps To Google Webmaster Tools
2. How To Optimize Your Titles For SEO In WordPress
3. Optimize Your Images With SEO Friendly Images Plugin For WordPress
4. Headspace2 Best SEO Plugin For WordPress Blogs
5. How To Optimize Custom More Text Link In Blog For Better Rankings

Filed Under: Blog Seo

Tags: blog sitemap, sitemaps wordpress