Making a WordPress Blog More Search Engine Friendly Part II
Properly notifying the major search engines of the various pages on your site can further improve the organic search engine traffic to your site. A common XML standard has been adopted by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN that makes mapping your site and getting the word out quick and convenient. There are a number of ways to build your XML sitemap, the most tedious of which is by hand. Mac users can use the Rage Google Sitemap Automator, which can not only generate the file for you just by providing the URL to your site, but it can even upload the file to your server and ping Google to let them know where the file is. Notifying Yahoo! has to be done manually via their Site Explorer tool, but the file doesn’t need to change at all. MSN is running behind trying to get a submission site set up, so although they are 100% behind the sitemap protocol, there is no means to submit your file.
WordPress users will be happy to know that an amazing Google Sitemap Generator plugin exists to create and submit your sitemap.xml to Google directly from your admin panel. Installation is simple, but a video tutorial has been created to walk your through the process should you get confused. The file it creates is also fine to submit to Yahoo! for indexing, making publicizing the structure of your site effortless.