Sitemaps, WordPress, and SEO

Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about your website and pages or posts that it may not otherwise discover. Sitemaps are simply XML documents that help Google by creating a list of links on your website and presenting them in a way that Google understands. By creating and submitting a sitemap to Google, you’re helping the search giant to find pages it might otherwise miss.

How to Create a Sitemap with WordPress

There are many great plugins for WordPress for website owners to use to create a Sitemap, perhaps one of the oldest and best known is Google XML Sitemap by Arne Brachhold, a very simple to install solution which will create a sitemap file for Google to  index.

Google has published a number of articles on how to build a Sitemap and some website owners may wish to create a more custom version for themselves. Here on thisismyurl.com for example we use no fewer than three sitemaps, each designed to help Google index the website in a different way.

• Google Images Sitemap (http://thisismyurl.com/image-sitemap.xml) which follows the Image Sitemap recommendations and indexes the feature images on thisismyurl.com for inclusion in the Google Image Search.
• Google Code Sitemap (http://thisismyurl.com/code-sitemap.xml) which includes a list of all articles containing code samples for Google to index and follows the Code Sitemap structure, allowing WordPress code snippets to be indexed at a higher rate.
• Google Sitemap (http://thisismyurl.com/sitemap.xml) which is a generic sitemap for all posts on thisismyurl.com and follows the recommendations of Google’s How to Create a Sitemap.

There are several additional Sitemap formats including video, images, mobile, news, source code, and geographic.

Who Should add a Sitemap to their website?

All website owners should have Sitemaps but they are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content and that content changes on a regular basis;
• Your site has hard to reach pages that the Googlebot can’t locate;
• Your site has few hyperlinks;
• Your site has a large archive of pages;

While Google doesn’t guarantee it will index (or even crawl) all the pages included in your Sitemap, it will use that information to make more informed calculations about your website and in most cases, website owners will benefit from the inclusion of a sitemap.

Adding Your Sitemap to a WordPress website

Once you’ve created your Sitemap, be sure to add it to your robots.txt file  if you would like the Sitemap to be auto discovered by Google. Simply add the line Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt file to ensure that Google is able to discover and index your Sitemap. Also, remember to add your RSS feed to your robots.txt file if you’d like to use the built in RSS feed for WordPress as a Sitemap on Google.

Your robots.txt file should look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/

Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/image-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/code-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/feed/

How to Add Your Sitemap to Google

Once you’ve created a Sitemap, adding the file to Google is done through your Google Webmaster account at http://google.com/webmaster/, simply choose your website from the list and navigate to Site configuration > Sitemaps  to see a list of your website Sitemaps and add new Sitemaps to your account.