No Comments Written by Robert on July 30, 2008 – 3:22 am

Sitemaps are one of the fastest and easiest ways to inform the major search engines about each and every one of your Web site’s pages. These powerful files can now be generated automatically by installing the WordPress Sitemap Generator. This generator updates your sitemap every time a new Web page is added to your Web site, and then “pings” the search engines to inform them that you have updated with fresh content.

This tool alone can often be enough to complete one of the initial goals of an SEO campaign: getting the search engines to your Web site. By having an accurate and up-to-date sitemap, you help to ensure that all your new content is found and indexed in the major search engines. After all, if your pages are not listed, they can never appear as a search result.

In 2005, Google introduced the XML sitemap format, and in 2006 it was adopted by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. This gave publishers a standard format to follow for creating one sitemap that the top search engines could use.

You can find specifics about the protocol at www.sitemaps.org. Because blogs can become very large, a sitemap is often needed to ensure that the major search engines can locate, crawl, and index each individual Web page. However, creating a sitemap by hand every time you make a new blog post gets very boring and redundant. Thankfully, there is a WordPress plugin called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress that takes all the work out of maintaining an up-to-date sitemap.

Once the plug-in is correctly installed, your sitemap is automatically rebuilt each time you make a new post. Not only that, the plug-in also pings the major search engines to alert them that you have updated your sitemap and added new content. This should bring the search-engine spiders to your site, and then direct them to your newly added Web page or pages. This plugin makes getting your Web site fully indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask incredibly easy.

The more pages you have indexed, the more chances you have of being returned as a search result. This plug-in is free, and has consistently been updated to match each update to the WordPress blogging software. However, the developer does accept donations for his time and effort.

The Google Sitemaps Generator for WordPress provides you an easy way to make sure your WordPress blog includes a Google sitemap. Providing Google with a valid list of all your pages is an incredibly helpful addition to the process of getting your blog fully indexed by Google. Although there are certain aspects of search-engine optimization that require an attention to detail and interpretation that cannot be done automatically by a script or program, certain tasks are able to be fully automated.

Whenever possible without sacrificing quality, you should make an effort to automate parts of your work. This not only saves you valuable time that could be spent doing more productive work, it also keeps your motivation levels high.

Having to perform excessive amounts of mundane grunt work can kill your inspiration to work fairly quickly, so you should automate whenever and wherever you can. Keep an eye out for updates to the WordPress system. Often, developers of popular extensions and plug-ins are ahead of the curve, but you do not want to update your copy of WordPress until you know your plug-ins can handle the switch.