WordPress Step by Step Tutorial Part 12 – Setting up a Sitemap and using Google Webmaster Tools
OK, we are continuing to add some of the supporting tools that are important to blog proprietors to gain valuable insight into what is happening on their blog. Google have 3 tools which are highly valuable, the first one, FeedBurner, we covered last time. This time lets look at Google’s Webmaster tools at Google Webmaster Central.
As long as you have a Google account, you should see this page…
Follow the instructions to get started and setup on Google Webmaster, once you have done that you will need to add a site. Put the address for your site in the Add Site text box and select “Add Site.”
Once you have done that your site should appear as a hotlink. Select that link and it will start walking you through the steps to setup your site on this tool.
First you are asked to “Verify your site.” This is a little complicated but fairly easy. Select the “Upload an HTML file option.” It will then ask you to create an html file with a specific name. Just open up your favourite text or HTML editor and create a blank file with the name specified. Then all you have to do is upload this to your site using your favourite FTP program, or any web based tool you’re hosting provider has to the root directory of your site. Once you have completed this then select “Verify” and this should complete this step!
You now get a page with a host of information that will help you learn about your users, and you have also let Google know about your site. This is important because of how important Google is in terms of people finding out about you. There is one more thing that we want to do here, and that is link Google to our sitemap. First however we are going to install a plug-in that will generate our sitemap and keep it up to date as we change our site. A sitemap is the organized structure of your website and Google uses it, as do other search engines to apply some logic to how sites our organized. Because we will be adding new content constantly, as is the nature of blogs, we want to have our sitemap dynamically updated to represent these changes. Arne Brachhold’s plug-in will do this for us, and you can download it from his site.
Install and activate it the usual way and then go to Settings > XML-Sitemap, which is a new option available to you introduced by this plug-in. Their are TONS of options available here, and as always I encourage you to learn more about what they can do, but that is outside the scope(for now at least) of what we want to cover here. Here we are going to leave all the options as is, and just select the generate a sitemap option at the top of the page. If successful you should get a page like this returned:
If you used the defaults as I did, your sitemap would be located at http://yoursite/sitemap.xml. You can verify this by scrolling down and checking in the XML-Sitemap options page. copy that address, whether it’s the default or not and go back to the Google Webmaster tools and share this link there:
Now the most popular site and search engine in the world knows about your blog. There are more options you can explore in Google Webmaster tools and if you were paying attention in the XML-Sitemap options, there were options for setting up similar options with Yahoo! and Microsoft. Now that you know the basics, feel free to explore more and decide what is right for you to add to, or just make note of there options in case you want to come back to them later.
These behind the scenes things may not make a lot of sense at this point if you don’t have a lot of familiarity with setting up a blog, but will come in handy later.
One more of these next time as we set up Google Analytics and then we’ll move on to some other stuff.