I discovered that my articles were displayed on the first page of Google results, when searches are conducted using simple words I mention in my blog. “blog worth” puts me in the top 3 results, with a link to Can you trust blog worth calculators?, “paypal vs moneybookers” put me on top, etc.

I make it easy for the Google spiders to crawl my site by using the Google Sitemap Wordpress plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap compliant to the standards set by www.sitemaps.org. These standards provide a way to make spiders crawl your site faster and more efficiently.

More search engines
Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask have joined this initiative to use the XML-Sitemaps to crawl sites more efficiently. This means that your pages could get seen faster. What should you do to enjoy these services?

Wordpress Users
Download and install the Google Sitemap Wordpress plugin. Tweak it to your own needs (Options -> Sitemap).

Other blog software users
Find and install an appropriate plugin for your software. If you can’t find any, try to follow the guidelines at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html to set up your own sitemap.

Everyone
After you have your sitemap up and working, add the following line to your robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Replace www.example.com with your own URL, and make sure this is the right place where the sitemap.xml is to be found.

Now the above mentioned search engines will be able to crawl your pages more efficiently.

Suggested reading
Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit

Suck it
If you like this article why don’t you suck my feed to be kept up to date about my recent articles?

Share this: