Page 5: WordPress has no Sitemap
If you want to rank well in the search engines an “XML Sitemap” is such a vital thing to have. It’s as basic as a robots.txt file or RSS feed. An XML Sitemap is a (newer) protocol that the search engines use before their search crawler indexes your site. Basically it’s a listing of all the post, pages, categories, and tag pages in your WordPress blog or web site. It’s like a roadmap for the search crawler, and even has codes for which pages should be indexed with a higher priority and they should come back. With an XML sitemap you can not only get indexed faster in the search engines, but you can notifiy google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask, each and every time you post. Read my article Tracking Sitemap Changes for SERP Pages to learn how to download the XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress and how it will benefit your blog. Then, read Increase Traffic with MSN, Yahoo!, and Google to learn how to “register” your new sitemap with MSN Live Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer Tools, and Google Webmaster Tools.
You really hit the nail on the head with this post…or 20 nails…
The funny thing is that everything you talked about here – are all things that i use on every blog. The comment form, the 2 sitemaps, the search log, some kind of stats, super cache, etc.
I’ve often wondered why a lot of these things don’t get built in.
Looks like the feed notations on commentluv didn’t work. delete the other one please.
Great resource you have compiled here. I think most people are aware of about half of these problems and the plugins to fix them, but this lays it all out.
Thanks!
Grants last blog post..Buy Groceries with Your Economic Stimulus Check
On the breadcrumb thing, were you not tempted to put JTPratt or some keywords or something instead of ‘home’ …? Would this not be better from SEO point of view?
malcolm coless last blog post..WordPress comment pagination & duplicate content
looking for the same plugin for a long time…thanks alot
latest love smss last blog post..Ahmed Faraz in English Mood
no really, because navigation for users always trumps SEO….
Do you still recommend wpSEO? This post was some time ago and things change fast. Is it still better than All In One or PlatinumSEO. I’ve tried AIO and Plat. Haven’t tried wpSEO. I can’t see a whole lot of difference, but I don’t have enough experience to know which performs better.
Randy Reeds last blog post..Introducing Sudokook.com
I use wpSEO on all the sites that I had it on, but now (the newer version) requires a paid license. So now I use All in one SEO on new sites I setup.
I just switched to platinum SEO because of the automatic 301 redirects when you change your links. I wanted to change the way I structured my links but thought it would be a pain to do it myself – well, I tried the platinum SEO plugin – changed the permalinks and checked my pages indexed in google and they all showed the new link structure. Don’t know how it did that but I’m sold.
I think from SEO standpoint, not having a sitemap means you aren’t realizing your full potential with search engine crawl and having maximum number of entries indexed.
Good tips on HTML tags and SEO for blogs! I have a WordPress blog bolted onto my “Plumbing” site and used an overlay template to make it look a little more unique. If you click on my name you will see the home page and can navigate to my blog by clicking on the “Comments” link at the bottom of the page.
Caution:
Do not get sucked into the SEO blog plug-in that Jeff Johnson promotes. It has a link back to his stuff in the footer of the blog. That link makes your blog look unprofessional I think. The best SEO overlay for WordPress is Semi-o-Logic. It’s an expensive upgrade, but worth the money if you’re serious about SEO for your blog.
I don’t know if WordPress reads your blog, but several of these have been added to the basic installation now.
Some really nice points.. WordPress comments are nofollowed by default and it doesn’t give us any option to turn them do follow. No built in advertising system and Statistics is a big hole.
.-= pc security´s last blog ..How to recognize phishing and spam email =-.
I’ve done two things: I wrote a php script to set a number of WordPress options — like my permalinks to the values I always use. Secondly, I have a checklist and always install the Comment Luv, Keyword Luv, Top Commenters and DoFollow every time I install WordPress on a domain.