A SiteMap for Your WordPress Blog

In the world of SEO sitemaps are consider a basic for every website. This got me thinking – Why not create a sitemap for my WordPress Blog.

In my quest for an answer I went straight to the source – Google. There I found the following:

“A Sitemap does not affect the actual ranking of your pages. However, if it helps get more of your site crawled (by notifying us of URLs we didn’t previously didn’t know about, and/or by helping us prioritize the URLs on your site), that can lead to increased presence and visibility of your site in our index.”

So what is Google saying? Essentially a Sitemap will not effect how pages are ranked. However, it will increase the speed at which the page is found and indexed by Google.

Wow! this is the proof I was looking for. If I can speed up the rate at which the search engines fine new entries on my wordpress website I am all for it.

Otherwise I will need to wait till the next time Google decides to crawl my home page. From there, Google will need to follow a link to my Blog and finally notice I made a new entry. That could take a while. I’m not one to wait; especially if I do not have to.

So I am off to generate a sitemap specifically for my wordpress blog so I can say to Google “Hey Look! Check this Out!”

Posted by Brought to you by Mozak Design | Filed Under Blogging, SEO 

Comments

4 Responses to “A SiteMap for Your WordPress Blog”

  1. Nick Hertz on December 16th, 2008 4:37 pm

    It sounds like generating a sitemap is essential for gaining more hits on your site. Like you said, it may not increase your ranking in google, but at least you’d be making your page more prevelant. Thats a good start!

  2. Jocelyn Mozak on December 16th, 2008 5:02 pm

    Looks like my theory worked! Nick found my blog post with in 12hrs of my generating it and submitting a sitemap to Google!

  3. OvertimeSportzwear on December 18th, 2008 1:09 am

    Wow. That shocks me to be honest that it wouldn’t raise your ratings in the rankings to have a site map which you would estimate would have more of your relevant keywords, right? Well good for you for testing it out :) My husband works on SEO stuff as well as a StomperNet member, so I’ll have to forward this post to him!

  4. Aaron C. Yeagle on July 25th, 2009 6:08 pm

    Actually, bots and spiders are just like people … lazy. They get bored quickly if there’s no new content or if the content isn’t keyword rich. Often, Googlebot stops searching after 2 possibly 3 layers. So if you have a sub-page of a sub-page its likely not to get indexed … thus a site map ensures that Googlebot goes to ALL pages of your site.