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.

I’ll be honest, I was really nervous and had to rewrite a whole lot of the presentation at the last minute when I couldn’t get a cable. You’ll also note some great things … one, I call Howard Lindzon “Howard Stern“, also I talk a lot about sex.

BTW, a few links from the video for you … Chris Bavota, Ron & Andrea Rennick, Bill Erickson, Brendan Sera-Shriar and of course Otto.

How to Make Money with WordPress (video)

It’s the site: element of a Google search and it’s designed to help you search a specific website, but what it’s also really handy for is returning results from relevant websites very quickly, and it saves you a bundle both in time and hopefully money.

Let’s say for example you’d like to find free WordPress themes. A typical Google search result for free WordPress themes (click the link to see your own results) will return 87,100,000 results with many of them being of a questionable nature but by simply adding the site: search parameter you can limit the results to a specific website such as WordPress.org which has the repository of thousands of free, GPL themes.

For example … site:wordpress.org free WordPress themes returns 35,000 results while site:wordpress.org free WordPress themes “cafe” (the word cafe will improve the chances of finding a theme suitable for a coffee shop in this example). Since search engine technology is often overly exhausting and complex for website owners to fully implement, it’s often best to allow websites such as Google to do the heavy lifting and return the best results within that website.

There are of course multiple other ways to use Google to find more free themes, graphics or tools to help small businesses but I think one of the most overlooked is the Advanced Search functionality at Google. The advanced search tool allows you to add specific words or phrases to include in your search, but also allows you to exclude words, this allows you to easily customize the results in a timely manner.

I think sometimes when we think about making money with a website, it’s easy to forget that saving money is still additional profit.

Very bad in fact. The type of bad that can kill the Internet as we know it, destroy free speech and change the way we surf the web forever. It’s bad enough that Facebook may go dark to protest it. It’s bad enough that Wikipedia is considering going offline and it’s bad enough that every website owner should be writing their government official to ensure this doesn’t go through.

How to participate in the SOPA blackout without losing your SEO

For website owners who are looking to protest SOPA, there are few choices except to participate in the blackout on Wednesday, but how can we do that while still protecting our existing SEO value?

Simply taking your website down for the day will result in a 404 error and cause Google to de-index your pages. Setting your robots.txt file to dis-allow everything will do the same thing, both will result in Google’s robots assuming your website is no longer online but … there is a solution. The 503 header is designed to tell search engine robots and visits that your website is temporarily unavailable and will return shortly.

I’ve created a free plugin to temporarily remove your website from the Internet (and allows you to leave a message for users) without hurting your SEO value, feel free to share it and download it for your own website.

Heidi Cohen has a wonderful piece about the 5 Stages of Social Media in which she breaks down the phases that a business goes through for social media, and presents a structured approach to businesses growing their social structure.  I think she’s right about almost everything she says but at the same time, I think it’s vital for business owners (and marketers) to take a step back from well executed social media strategies and remember what it’s really about … being social.

Here are my 5 rules for social media, let me know if you agree or disagree.

Be remarkable.

I love that word, remarkable. I use it on the new Rodonic website all the time, because it doesn’t mean the same as great or impressive, it means to be worthy of remark. I learned that reading one of Seth Godin‘s books.

Be interesting.

Colleen Kitts is a writer in Fredericton who spends too much of her time correcting my grammar and spelling. She reminded me this week that being interesting is important as a blogger, but also on social media. That’s why I’m a fan of George Takei.

Be positive.

Positive is another funny word, we tend to think of it as meaning uplifting or cheery, but it actually means to be clear and without doubt, being positive about something is to be clear about it and have faith in what your saying, which would make anybody pleased.

Be honest.

The internet has a very, very long memory. If you’re going to take the time to post something, make sure it’s the truth and on those rare occasions when you’re wrong, be sure to correct yourself before somebody else does.

Be yourself.

I can’t stress this one enough, be yourself.

How do you influence what people think of you or your company using the Internet? Or perhaps, a broader question is how do the methods we’ve used our whole lives translate to the modern digital world?  I’ve outlined seven ways to help manage your business reputation online.

Be honest and consistent.

Nothing is more insulting to an irate customer than insincerity. Years ago I was flying from Edmonton, Alberta to Fredericton, New Brunswick the day before Christmas. We had a connecting flight in Toronto, Ontario but the plane was three hours late taking off from Edmonton and we all knew that our connecting flights would leave without us but the air crew had been trained to lie to us and tell us everything would be OK, clearly it wasn’t.

While the air crew choose to blame the weather for our delay, a quick search and a phone call to the airport terminal revealed that the reason for our delay was due to a shortage of ground crew staff, in short there was nobody to load our luggage.

This reminds me of a rule an Art Director once taught me, it’s OK to screw up in graphic design, but do it consistently and people will just assume it’s part of your style.

Learn to apologize, for real.

If there’s one thing that I fear we’ve lost in the age of 140 character messages and email, it’s the art of an apology. We all make mistakes, so learn how to be genuine and apologize. Here’s mine;

I’m sorry for not posting much in the past month, I know my regular readers might have wondered where I disappeared to and that it’s not acceptable for me to simply stop posting. I was caught up with the holidays, a crisis at work and a lack of motivation. I took some time away from blogging to help myself get a clearer picture of what I wanted to blog about and hope you’ll approve of the new subjects.

Respond to issues before they become crisis.

If there’s one thing that great politicians have taught us over the years it is that the saying ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ is more than a old adage, it’s a way of life. Now I’m not talking about national politicians or celebrity politicians, I’m talking about the type of mayor who gets re-elected five, six or even ten times in a row. The type of political powerhouse who could easily run for a Senate seat but instead stays in the community.

These people know how to manage issues before those issues because crisis and it’s a vital skill that every online business should take the time to learn. What seasoned politicians don’t do is start deleting comments off their Facebook wall in response to an advertising failure. This Christmas, Zellers (Canada’s version of Target) did just that when they accidentally published a Facebook coupon offering 50% off anything in the store. The proper response would have been to fix the issue, apologize and close the issue. The incorrect response … would have been everything Zellers did.

Have a clear method of communication.

Let us lament the days gone by when we, the company, controlled the message because it’s gone (if it ever truly existed) and instead accept that today customers can control the message. Look at what happened to GoDaddy this year when they openly supported the Stop Online Piracy Act, activists took to the social media channels and the result was thousands of customers leaving GoDaddy over the holidays.

It could have, if GoDaddy had listened to all of it’s stakeholders but this story reminds me of working for an international software developer in Ottawa, Ontario. I was working as the web master for the company (let’s pretend you don’t know them) in 2000 and asked the email team, how I could access the webmaster@ email account, their response? You couldn’t. The email address went straight to the spam folder, despite being publicly posted throughout our website because as their director explained …. too many people used it to complain about things. That may have worked in 2000 but with social media, your best defence against a consumer backlash is to offer a free and easy means for them to talk directly with your team.

Dedicate your best people to solving your problems.

Every company has gate keepers, they’re the lower rung employee who’s job it is to protect management from the rest of the company, the general public, sales people and unfortunately the customer. The gate keeper’s job is to protect the important people inside the company from people who would consume their time and waste company resources.

We all hate the gate keeper but nobody hates the gate keeper more than a customer with a legitimate problem that could be solved by an effective employee quickly. Instead of hiring more gate keepers to keep the thinkers from interacting with customers, companies should be encouraging these core team members to spend more time with customers.

Be open and stop hiding behind your rules.

Customers may hate the gate keeper but we truly loathe the bureaucrat who hides behind company policy when a decision is clearly unjust and public opinion (the type that is generated through social media) doesn’t care about your rules, they care about what’s right and wrong.

In the 1960′s, the Canadian government sprayed large areas of land outside Fredericton with Agent Orange. While not admitting fault, in 2007 the government began issuing cheques to victims of the after affects but dozens of people found themselves without compensation due to an overly complex, bureaucratic application process. The resulting public outcry led the government to reverse it’s decision and compensate people caught up in the “less than perfect” program.

Learn from what WalMart does right.

You won’t often hear me compliment WalMart, but one thing WalMart does exceptionally well is handle returns. In fact, they seem almost happy to take their merchandise back. It’s hard to complain about anything when you show up to their store in a foul mood, wait in line for less time than you expected and then find yourself greeted by a smiling, happy person who’s ready to give your money back.

In the online world, we might not always be able to do it quite as well as WalMart does at store level, but we can help customers get over their frustrations and solve their issues before they become crisis, we can be sincere with them and apologize instead of hiding behind bureaucracy and we can help our customers by opening better means to communication, directly to the people who can help them best.

http://www.developerdrive.com/

http://www.castirondesign.com/

http://www.ecomagination.com/

http://editerjournal.com/

http://www.stubbleandglasses.com/

Have you seen some great looking WordPress websites that you’d like to share with me? I’m always looking for websites designed with WordPress that don’t look like a traditional WordPress powered blog. Have a safe and happy holiday.

The new 3.3 update has some pretty impressive features and appears to be mostly aimed at making WordPress easier to use for novice users. For example, the tool tips (displayed to the right of this) adds easy to understand visual tips to some of the improvements, ensuring users are not overwhelmed by the changes.

The new media uploader that I wrote about a few weeks ago is now also implemented and makes the upload process a simple matter of dragging and dropping, rather than selecting files through a traditional form interface.

WPCandy’s article on the 3.3 upgrade makes an interesting point that 180 developers contributed 1,200 unique changes to WordPress 3.3 for a combined total of 138 days of coding. As of noon today, it had already been downloaded over 300,000 times but that number keeps climbing, here’s the WordPress download counter.

As I mentioned in my WordCamp Toronto and WordCamp Detroit speeches, the vast majority of websites are out of date and I suspect that most of those are because users either don’t have the time or the technical expertise to update WordPress. If you need a hand updating your WordPress install to the latest version, contact me and I’ll make sure your website is updated properly for a reasonable price.

info@thisismyurl.com

Insanity you say, and I would agree except for a re-tweet by Nacin this morning, from WordPress core developer Aaron Jorbin. ”Why is @Politico honoring the sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act as “policymakers of the year in technology”?”. Aaron’s article is in itself interesting but more interesting is a link to Piracy bill could waylay FLOSS projects which details two new bills (PROTECT IP (S. 968) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (HR. 3261)) that are being considered at the moment.

Essentially, the bills boil down to this … piracy is bad.

You can agree or disagree with that statement, but what the bill allows for is copyright holders to order the removal websites it believes to be violating their copyright (note: they don’t need to prove a violation, only accuse a site of copyright violation) to be taken offline, de-indexed by search engines, have their ad revenues canceled and payment gateways shutdown.

Then it gets ugly.

The bill also allows for the same copyright holders to do the same to any tool they believe is facilitating the infringement of their copyright (again no proof required). Let’s be clear about that … you build a website and share a copy of a copyrighted work such as a Youtube video or paragraph from a copyrighted work then the copyright holder orders not only your website but also the tools (ie WordPress) that you used to build your website to be punished.

So you tell me, if these bills pass … could WordPress be dead in 2012 or is Yahoo just overreaching?

Are website design schools a good investment?

When it comes to website design, there are plenty of schools, classes and courses that promise to help you learn the fundamentals of website design but are they really worth the investment? I don’t think they are, unless you’re a book learner with poor personal management skills who require a lot of oversight … in which case, website design isn’t going to be a career you seriously want to consider as it’s a fairly solitary career path.

Now, that’s not to say that website design schools are a bad idea, in fact I think that they’re a fantastic training ground for people to get a fundamental background in the technologies, but they’re only as good as the people they have teaching. There so before investing in a college or university website design course, talk to recent graduates as well as people who are in their senior year at the school. Ask them if they’re working in the field, look at their portfolio and be assertive. Schools cost a lot of money, make sure that you’re getting the best education possible.

How to learn website design, without a school

Website design is actually a fascinating career path because everything you need to learn to be a website designer is available for free, even the software you need to be an effective website designer is available as a free download! There are few other careers that I can think of that all your tools (minus a fairly basic computer and internet connection) are free.

So where do we start?

Learn about basic document structure

The first thing you need to do in order to build web pages is forget everything you think you know about websites. Building effective websites is about learning to build effective documents, not attractive pages. That means you’ll need to understand the basic HTML structure of a document before you begin to worry about how it looks.

Learning basic HTML structure is boring learning, most people don’t get past this stage but step one to having a career in website design is about understanding basic tags such as the paragraph and line break tags. Remember, web pages are documents, just like Microsoft Word documents. To be an effective designer, you need to learn how to structure a document.

Learn how to style a document

Styling a document is a lot more fun than laying out a document, this is where your creative talents as a designer start to come in. Adding a cascading style sheet (CSS) to your website allows you to affect color, font sizing and much more. Practice by adding basic CSS to a well structured document and changing how your document looks.

There are plenty of free CSS tutorials on the web, one of my favourite authors is Bavotasan who shows off some amazing CSS tricks such as How to Rotate Images with CSS3and how to Create a Black & White Thumbnail in WordPress.

Learning website design with a mentor

As I mentioned earlier, website design is a solitary profession. A lot of time is spent alone infront of a computer, but there’s no reason that learning has to be done alone. Just like learning a new language, one of the best ways to learn website design is with a mentor so find a site designer that you like and send them an email to ask if they’d consider mentoring you through the initial stages of learning, the worst they can say is no.