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Sitemap Generator for Wordpress Plugin

Although it is not absolutely necessary to create a site map and submit to google, it does help to do it because it makes it easier and faster for google to crawl your pages and index them correctly. Google basically uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase their coverage of your webpages. You should submit your website to as many directories as possible, including the Open Directory Project.

Step 1: Download the XML sitemap generator from here

Step 2: Drag the folder to your plugins area using your ftp server.

Step 3: Activate the plugin from your admin panel

Step 4: In wordpress 2.5, Go to ’setttings’ and click on XML-Sitemap and you’ll get the following screen. Click on where it says ‘Click here’ to build your sitemap.

Once you do this you get a screen like this (below) which confirms that your sitemap has been built.

If you click on the above ’sitemap’ you can see the sitemap which has been built for you (as below).

The next thing you have to do is submit your sitemap to google. On the right hand side you will see something which says ‘webmaster tools’. Once you click on this you will be taken to googles webmaster tools dashboard. There is an option here to add your site, so type in your site as illustrated below – ie. www.whateveryoursiteis.com and click on ‘add site’

Copy the end of the URL which is displayed at the top of this page and go back to the webmaster tools website. You only need the last bit of the URL – i.e. just the bit which says sitemap.xml (see below for example).

Click on Sitemaps, Add sitemap. There is a drop down menu – choose ‘Add General Website’ as displayed below.

Add the sitemap.xml text and click on ‘Add General Web Sitemap’.

You then get a ‘Successfully added’ screen like the one below.

You will then be asked to verify your site. On this screen you may see that Googlebot has already successfully accessed your home page before. This just means that google has crawled your site, but because we now have a sitemap it will make it even easier and faster and the crawl will also be more accurate next time google crawls it.

Once you click on ‘verify site’ the following screen will appear. The words ‘not verified’ appear. This means your site has not yet been verified, which we now have to do. There are two ways to do this, by adding a meta tag or uploading a HTML file. Personally, I found it easier to upload the html file so that it what I will show you how to do here.

Once you choose the option from the drop down menu to verify it by uploading a html file, the following screen will appear. You are then asked to create a file with this name and upload it to your website.

The next step requires you to open notepad and simply click on save as and copy the html verification file so the name of your file matches that of the one provided – i.e. something like google11e16a9c84a5db38.html

Save this file where it is easily accessible and then drag and drop it into your site using an ftp server. I prefer filezilla because it’s reliable and free.

In step 2 on the verification page, you will notice it asks you whether or not you’ve uploaded the file and can view it in your browser. Just copy the file which has your website name and the .html code at the end of it into your browser and see if anything comes up. If you haven’t put it any text then a blank screen should appear.

After you verify your site you should get a ‘Success’ screen like the one below.

Trouble Shooting

When I first tried to verify my site I got the following error message which said Verification status: NOT VERIFIED. We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header. This happened on two of my sites. The first time I fixed it by disabling a ‘redirect plugin’ and the second time I managed to get it working by updating my permalink to custom %postname%, which I had forgotten to do when setting the site up. I’m not a technical person so I have no idea why this happened?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 3:01 am and is filed under Best Wordpress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.