We wrote previously that on-site optimization would perhaps constitute half of your efforts in making your website or blog more search-engine friendly, and rank higher on the more popular search engines (namely Google and what’s-the-other-ones?).

On-site optimizations are, in essence, means by which you make your site better read and understood by machines–that is, the search bots. Consider that machines are not capable of reading certain web elements, like images and layouts. Hence the move to a “semantic” web, where the design and content elements are kept separate. This means machines incapable of human understanding can better “read” websites.

And this is where sitemaps fall under. They’re basically tables of content for your website. Sitemaps tell the Google bots where to go and search for information (sometimes the bots come across broken links and just quit indexing your site altogether!).

Installing Sitemaps for your Blog

Let’s work on one of the more popular blogging platforms to date, WordPress. As we mentioned before, you would first have to generate a sitemap from your site, and you could use a handful of solutions to do this.

Fortunately, WordPress plugins abound, and you can find a WordPress plugin that does just what you need to get your blog into Sitemaps. Simply download the plugin, copy it into your plugins folder, then activate.

The plugin will then create a static sitemap page on your root blog directory, in XML and Gzipped formats, and this is what you would upload to Google Sitemaps.

Uploading to Google

Generating a sitemap file is only half of the job. You would then have to upload that Sitemap-format (usually XML) file into Google Sitemaps, so Google will know exactly which file to crawl when its bots visit your site.

Simply enter the location of the sitemap XML that your plugin has created for you on the text box.

Whenever you update your WordPress blog, the sitemap plugin will update the XML file for new URLs to inclde. Or, you can always use the plugin’s “rebuild” function to create a new sitemap when you feel the XML is not adequately updated.