Sitemaps have perplexed me ever since I started blogging. I understood that they were a page that linked to all the pages in your site, and they were good food for the search engines, but besides that, I didn’t know how to submit one to Google or how to set one up for my WordPress blog.
Does this describe you? If so, you’re in luck.
How to submit a WordPress site map to Google
1. Get a google webmaster tools account. If you already have Gmail, you should just be able to sign in to your gmail account and then go here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/.
2. Add your site in the webmaster tools dashboard. Verify that you own the site by following the instructions that Google provides.
3. Go here: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/#P18DL and download the plugin. Install the plugin. If you’re not sure how to do this, either contact me, or search the internet. Pretty easy.
4. Activate the plugin within your WordPress admin.
5. Go to Settings > XML-Sitemap
6. You may want to configure some of the settings, but if you’re noob, don’t worry about it. All you need to know is the “Location of your sitemap file.” It should be this: http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
7. Go back to your Google webmaster tools account and add a sitemap to the site you already have. Google will already have http://yoursite.com/ and you just need to add the sitemap.xml part and submit it.
This is all pretty easy, but if you don’t get it, or have some issues, comment or contact me. I’ll help you out.
You can check out the Elite Eternity site map by checking out this link: http://eliteeternity.com/sitemap.xml. This is what Google reads when it queries your site.
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