How to Create a Sitemap with WordPress

There are many great plugins for WordPress for website owners to use to create a Sitemap, perhaps one of the oldest and best known is Google XML Sitemap by Arne Brachhold, a very simple to install solution which will create a sitemap file for Google to  index.

Google has published a number of articles on how to build a Sitemap, and some website owners may wish to create a more custom version for themselves. Here on thisismyurl.com for example, we use no fewer than three sitemaps, each designed to help Google index the website in a different way.

• Google Images Sitemap (http://thisismyurl.com/image-sitemap.xml) which follows the Image Sitemap recommendations and indexes the feature images on thisismyurl.com for inclusion in the Google Image Search.
• Google Code Sitemap (http://thisismyurl.com/code-sitemap.xml) which includes a list of all articles containing code samples for Google to index and follows the Code Sitemap structure, allowing WordPress code snippets to be indexed at a higher rate.
• Google Sitemap (http://thisismyurl.com/sitemap.xml) which is a generic sitemap for all posts on thisismyurl.com and follows the recommendations of Google’s How to Create a Sitemap.

There are several additional Sitemap formats including video, images, mobile, news, source code, and geographic.

Who Should add a Sitemap to their website?

All website owners should have Sitemaps but they are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content and that content changes on a regular basis;
• Your site has hard to reach pages that the Googlebot can’t locate;
• Your site has few hyperlinks;
• Your site has a large archive of pages;

While Google doesn’t guarantee it will index (or even crawl) all the pages included in your Sitemap, it will use that information to make more informed calculations about your website and in most cases, website owners will benefit from the inclusion of a sitemap.

Adding Your Sitemap to a WordPress website

Once you’ve created your Sitemap, be sure to add it to your robots.txt file. If you would like the Sitemap to be auto discovered by Google simply add the line Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt file to ensure that Google is able to discover and index your Sitemap. Also, remember to add your RSS feed to your robots.txt file if you’d like to use the built in RSS feed for WordPress as a Sitemap on Google.

Your robots.txt file should look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/

Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/image-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/code-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://thisismyurl.com/feed/

How to Add Your Sitemap to Google

Once you’ve created a Sitemap, adding the file to Google is done through your Google Webmaster account at http://google.com/webmaster/, simply choose your website from the list and navigate to Site configuration > Sitemaps  to see a list of your website Sitemaps and add new Sitemaps to your account.

I’ll be honest, I was really nervous and had to rewrite a whole lot of the presentation at the last minute when I couldn’t get a cable. You’ll also note some great things … one, I call Howard Lindzon “Howard Stern“, also I talk a lot about sex.

BTW, a few links from the video for you … Chris Bavota, Ron & Andrea Rennick, Bill Erickson, Brendan Sera-Shriar and of course Otto.

How to Make Money with WordPress (video)

Heidi Cohen has a wonderful piece about the 5 Stages of Social Media in which she breaks down the phases that a business goes through for social media, and presents a structured approach to businesses growing their social structure.  I think she’s right about almost everything she says but at the same time, I think it’s vital for business owners (and marketers) to take a step back from well executed social media strategies and remember what it’s really about … being social.

Here are my 5 rules for social media, let me know if you agree or disagree.

Be remarkable.

I love that word, remarkable. I use it on the new Rodonic website all the time, because it doesn’t mean the same as great or impressive, it means to be worthy of remark. I learned that reading one of Seth Godin‘s books.

Be interesting.

Colleen Kitts is a writer in Fredericton who spends too much of her time correcting my grammar and spelling. She reminded me this week that being interesting is important as a blogger, but also on social media. That’s why I’m a fan of George Takei.

Be positive.

Positive is another funny word, we tend to think of it as meaning uplifting or cheery, but it actually means to be clear and without doubt, being positive about something is to be clear about it and have faith in what your saying, which would make anybody pleased.

Be honest.

The internet has a very, very long memory. If you’re going to take the time to post something, make sure it’s the truth and on those rare occasions when you’re wrong, be sure to correct yourself before somebody else does.

Be yourself.

I can’t stress this one enough, be yourself.

How do you influence what people think of you or your company using the Internet? Or perhaps, a broader question is how do the methods we’ve used our whole lives translate to the modern digital world?  I’ve outlined seven ways to help manage your business reputation online.

Be honest and consistent.

Nothing is more insulting to an irate customer than insincerity. Years ago I was flying from Edmonton, Alberta to Fredericton, New Brunswick the day before Christmas. We had a connecting flight in Toronto, Ontario but the plane was three hours late taking off from Edmonton and we all knew that our connecting flights would leave without us but the air crew had been trained to lie to us and tell us everything would be OK, clearly it wasn’t.

While the air crew choose to blame the weather for our delay, a quick search and a phone call to the airport terminal revealed that the reason for our delay was due to a shortage of ground crew staff, in short there was nobody to load our luggage.

This reminds me of a rule an Art Director once taught me, it’s OK to screw up in graphic design, but do it consistently and people will just assume it’s part of your style.

Learn to apologize, for real.

If there’s one thing that I fear we’ve lost in the age of 140 character messages and email, it’s the art of an apology. We all make mistakes, so learn how to be genuine and apologize. Here’s mine;

I’m sorry for not posting much in the past month, I know my regular readers might have wondered where I disappeared to and that it’s not acceptable for me to simply stop posting. I was caught up with the holidays, a crisis at work and a lack of motivation. I took some time away from blogging to help myself get a clearer picture of what I wanted to blog about and hope you’ll approve of the new subjects.

Respond to issues before they become crisis.

If there’s one thing that great politicians have taught us over the years it is that the saying ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ is more than a old adage, it’s a way of life. Now I’m not talking about national politicians or celebrity politicians, I’m talking about the type of mayor who gets re-elected five, six or even ten times in a row. The type of political powerhouse who could easily run for a Senate seat but instead stays in the community.

These people know how to manage issues before those issues because crisis and it’s a vital skill that every online business should take the time to learn. What seasoned politicians don’t do is start deleting comments off their Facebook wall in response to an advertising failure. This Christmas, Zellers (Canada’s version of Target) did just that when they accidentally published a Facebook coupon offering 50% off anything in the store. The proper response would have been to fix the issue, apologize and close the issue. The incorrect response … would have been everything Zellers did.

Have a clear method of communication.

Let us lament the days gone by when we, the company, controlled the message because it’s gone (if it ever truly existed) and instead accept that today customers can control the message. Look at what happened to GoDaddy this year when they openly supported the Stop Online Piracy Act, activists took to the social media channels and the result was thousands of customers leaving GoDaddy over the holidays.

It could have, if GoDaddy had listened to all of it’s stakeholders but this story reminds me of working for an international software developer in Ottawa, Ontario. I was working as the web master for the company (let’s pretend you don’t know them) in 2000 and asked the email team, how I could access the webmaster@ email account, their response? You couldn’t. The email address went straight to the spam folder, despite being publicly posted throughout our website because as their director explained …. too many people used it to complain about things. That may have worked in 2000 but with social media, your best defence against a consumer backlash is to offer a free and easy means for them to talk directly with your team.

Dedicate your best people to solving your problems.

Every company has gate keepers, they’re the lower rung employee who’s job it is to protect management from the rest of the company, the general public, sales people and unfortunately the customer. The gate keeper’s job is to protect the important people inside the company from people who would consume their time and waste company resources.

We all hate the gate keeper but nobody hates the gate keeper more than a customer with a legitimate problem that could be solved by an effective employee quickly. Instead of hiring more gate keepers to keep the thinkers from interacting with customers, companies should be encouraging these core team members to spend more time with customers.

Be open and stop hiding behind your rules.

Customers may hate the gate keeper but we truly loathe the bureaucrat who hides behind company policy when a decision is clearly unjust and public opinion (the type that is generated through social media) doesn’t care about your rules, they care about what’s right and wrong.

In the 1960′s, the Canadian government sprayed large areas of land outside Fredericton with Agent Orange. While not admitting fault, in 2007 the government began issuing cheques to victims of the after affects but dozens of people found themselves without compensation due to an overly complex, bureaucratic application process. The resulting public outcry led the government to reverse it’s decision and compensate people caught up in the “less than perfect” program.

Learn from what WalMart does right.

You won’t often hear me compliment WalMart, but one thing WalMart does exceptionally well is handle returns. In fact, they seem almost happy to take their merchandise back. It’s hard to complain about anything when you show up to their store in a foul mood, wait in line for less time than you expected and then find yourself greeted by a smiling, happy person who’s ready to give your money back.

In the online world, we might not always be able to do it quite as well as WalMart does at store level, but we can help customers get over their frustrations and solve their issues before they become crisis, we can be sincere with them and apologize instead of hiding behind bureaucracy and we can help our customers by opening better means to communication, directly to the people who can help them best.

http://www.developerdrive.com/

http://www.castirondesign.com/

http://www.ecomagination.com/

http://editerjournal.com/

http://www.stubbleandglasses.com/

Have you seen some great looking WordPress websites that you’d like to share with me? I’m always looking for websites designed with WordPress that don’t look like a traditional WordPress powered blog. Have a safe and happy holiday.

WordPress is a big software package. It’s comparable to a desktop publishing suite in a lot of ways, so it’s vital that your website host gives WordPress enough power to run properly. Before you invest in a hosting company, call their technical support team and ask some basic questions about WordPress. That way you can gauge their understanding of the package.

Learn about your website visitors

It’s critical for first time bloggers to know how many people are coming to your website and what they’re reading while they’re on your site. Make sure to install JetPack to take advantage of the free WordPress.com statistics (also install my WordPress.com Smiley Face remover plugin to hide the smiley face it adds). This package will not only let you know how many people come to your site, but also what they’re reading and where they’re coming from.

Take advantage of features in WordPress

WordPress has tons of great features and an effective blogger is somebody who learns how to take advantage of those features to improve their writing efforts. For example, did you know that you can schedule a post in WordPress to appear at a later date? It’s easy, just click the Edit button beside Publish Immediately and select the date!

Search engine optimization should come later

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a method for making your articles more appealing to search engines by organizing the content in a structured manner. It helps your website get listed faster and more often. However, it shouldn’t be the focus of a new blog. Instead, take advantage of the built-in power of WordPress to make your website searchable and focus on writing great content.

Understand why you’re blogging

I love this video. It features author Seth Godin and Tom Peters discussing why they blog. It’s a powerful promotion for blogging because it’s clear that both of the presenters understand the power of blogging, as well as why they do it.

These ten plugins are designed to improve how users can share your content with their friends and promote your website through social marketing and online networks.

1. JetPack includes ShareDaddy to easily add share links on the bottom of your posts. This encourages users to Tweet, Like or Share your content, includes Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg as well as Twitter and Facebook. Also includes a Twitter widget and shortlink generator for your posts.
2. Sexy Bookmarks is very similar to JetPack’s ShareDaddy, but allows linking to dozens of social bookmark services and is, well, sexy.
3. Sociable is another alternative method for adding share and email options to your posts.
4. Bookmarkify is an alternative method for adding share and email options to your posts.
5. ShareThis is the granddaddy of social booking. ShareThis is the most extensive of the social sharing services with a huge library to choose from.
6. Share on Facebook  will add a Facebook share button to your post.
7. Digg This adds a Digg button to your post.
8. TweetMeme easily adds a Tweet button to your posts.
9. I love Social Bookmarketing is another option , similar to JetPack’s ShareDaddy and Sexy Bookmarks.
10. Social Bookmarks – one last alternative, similar to JetPack ShareDaddy and Sexy Bookmarks.

While limited to a few key services, my favourite in the list above is JetPack because of its simplicity of operation and easy means of adding new services.

Comment Plugins for WordPress

Improving the comments on your website will not only increase return visits, but also help search engines to know your pages are active and full of fresh content.

1. Disqus offers a great, clean commenting tool for WordPress and integrates with Askimet for spam fighting.
2. OpenID works with the built-in WordPress comments to offer users the option of signing in via their OpenID profile.
3. Twitter Avatars In Comments allows users’ comments to include their Twitter profile picture. You can also do it without a plugin, if you enjoy coding.
4. TinyMCE Comments adds the TinyMCE html editor to comments.
5. CommentLuv shares the title of the comment author’s latest post with CommentLuv.
6. @reply adds the ability to use Twitterish @reply-to links in comments.
7. JetPack adds Gravatar hovercards with profile details for comment authors. While we’re on the subject of Gravatar, Gravatar Signup adds a checkbox for quick sign up for non Gravatar members.
8. IntenseDebate Comments is a powerful commenting tool similar to Disqus, from the makers of WordPress.
9. Facebook Comments – there are several plugins available to take care of integrating Facebook to WordPress, I’ll just link to the list and you can try them out.
10. Paged Comments stops your comments from getting out of control by displaying only a set number per page.

Search Engine Optimization Plugins for WordPress

These plugins are designed to improve your SEO performance and bring traffic to your website through search engines.

1. Google XML Sitemaps works with Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google what changes to your website should be indexed.
2. Redirection is perfect for migrating URLs to a new site structure. If you’ve updated your blog, moved a page or changed the location of a file you can use this plugin to tell search engines where it is.
3. Simple Tags  helps you pick tags for your posts by integrating with Yahoo and other search engines for advice.
4. Robots Meta add metadata to your posts and pages to help search engines process your pages.
5. SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title tags to your images based on your post name.
6. SEO No Duplicate removes duplicate content from your website listings.
7. Google Images Sitemap adds your website images to Google Images with Webmaster Tools.
8. SEO Slugs removes excess words (e.g. the, an,a) from your permalinks to increase slug performance.

Deep Linking Plugins for WordPress

The term deep linking describes a simple SEO strategy of linking to relevant posts deep within your website. This helps readers and search engines find content no longer on your homepage.

1. Easy Popular Posts  links to the most popular posts on your website.
2. Easy Recent Posts links to the most recent posts on your site.
3. Easy Random Posts links to 5,10,20 or more random posts on your site.
4. Easy Related Posts automatically finds related posts on your site.
5. SEO Smart Links links popular words in your posts to related content on your website.

1. Unique Content

Your website is your voice to the world! Use it to speak to your audience but use your own words. It’ll help your SEO as well as building an audience.

2. Hyperlink Keywords

This drives search engines wild, it helps readers find great content and it helps search engines dive deep into your website. See my article on deep linking with WordPress to learn about it.

3. Focus your Titles with Keywords

Titles are the most important SEO element on a page. They appear in search engine results and are vital to being found. Use keywords in your titles, but never force it, stay natural.

4. Tag your Posts in WordPress

Use the Tags option to build a directory of interlinking articles and, while you’re at it, drive the point home with powerful WordPress meta tags. You can build them without a plugin.

5. Use WordPress Excerpts

Every time you post a new article, include an excerpt as a short summary and include it as your post description using meta tags.

6. Make the Most of Comments

Search engines love comments. They keep content fresh and help your site stay relevant. Sometimes I find the comments on a post as important (or even more relevant) to my search than the original article.

7. Keep Your Website Simple

We all want a great looking website, but don’t get caught in a design trap. Install the default WordPress theme while you’re starting out and focus on the content.

8. Make the Most of JetPack

The great team behind WordPress have released a monster plugin called JetPack and it’s jam-packed with goodies. There are share buttons, URL shorteners and more short codes than you can shake a stick at! These are all tuned to work perfectly on WordPress websites and are easy to install.

9. Use Social Networks

Share your posts on social networks, offer retweet and repost buttons. Make sharing easy. These links will drive both people and search engines back to your website.

10. Include Photos, Maps and More

Drive traffic to your website using photo search engines. Remember that people find your content through more than just the main search tools of Google. Add your images to Google Images, get listed in Google News and include yourself on Google Maps.

What is Deep Linking?

First of all, let’s establish what deep linking is so that there is no mystery to it. You’ll see why it’s such a vital step in both online marketing and search engine optimization.

Deep linking, while it sounds complicated, is simply the process of linking from one page on your website to another page throughout the text. For example, in this article I’ve mentioned the phrase search engine optimization and since I know that some readers won’t know what search engine optimization is, I’ve linked those words to another article that focuses on search engine optimization. That’s all deep linking is – helping your visitors to move from one page to another to find related content.

Why is Deep Linking Valuable?

Linking content from one page to another is valuable for two key reasons:

1. It helps search engines find content on your website and, as a result, index those pages;
2. It helps readers find content on your website and therefore read more of what you post.

Both of those are tremendously important for online marketing. Using deep linking, you’re not only helping your visitors, but also helping search engines to better understand your content.

How to Deep Link in WordPress

The first step to deep linking in WordPress is to remember that it’s all about helping people find similar content. Scan through your post and find a keyword or phrase that you feel a reader might want more information about.

Next, save the post as a Draft copy (located in the Publish box of your post editor).

To make editing easier, open a new browser window and navigate to Posts > All Posts in WordPress.

Using the Search Posts field at the top right-hand of your posts list, search for  articles that feature the keyword or phrase you’d like to link to and call up a list of related posts by clicking Search Posts.

You can grab the URL of the post you’d like to link to by right clicking the View option while hovering over the article name, or click the View link to open the post into a new window.

Now that you have the URL of your target article copied to your clipboard, let’s go back to the original article and insert it as a link.

1. Select the words that you would like to be hyperlinked;
2. Click the small link icon located in the editor toolbar for WordPress ();
3. Paste the link into the available URL field and add a title to your link.

Once you click Add Link you have successfully created a link between the new article and the older article, stored deep in your website.

Quick Tips for Deep Linking

1. Only link to content that is relevant and helpful;
2. Limit the number of links in an article to a reasonable amount, based on content;
3. Avoid linking entire paragraphs or large sentences;
4. Avoid hyperlinking words such as “Click here” or “Read More”, instead link phrases.

Despite the simplicity of installing a blog (Bluehost for example offers a one click solution), running a successful blog still has a lot more to do with mastering the world of publishing, rather than the technical aspects of setting up a website address and WordPress. This is especially true if you’re looking to build a regular readership and a successful advertising campaign.

The key to blog success is to convince readers to visit your blog and continue to return. This is the most important aspect of your website. Remember, readers don’t differentiate between a blog and a magazine, so your content should attract and retain an audience just like print publications.

Here are ten steps to develop a successful and profitable blog.

Understand your Blog Market

Remember that blogging isn’t about technology, it’s about writing for your subject in a way that readers will enjoy and want to come back. You’ll need to education yourself on what works and doesn’t in the online world and the best ways to do that is to look at other, successful blogs to see what they’re doing right (and wrong).

How do you know who’s successful? Tools like Alexa and Complete allow you to review the traffic patterns of other websites for free.

Find a Niche that Works

What to write about becomes an even more difficult question when faced with the concern of making a blog profitable, but using popular technology, it’s easier than you think. Google offers a tool as part of their Google AdWords suite to help identify popular, profitable and competitive keywords for bloggers.

Using the AdWords tool, a blogger can review their subjects to see which ideas could have an audience as well as which are profitable. In the example to the right, you’ll see that the subject apple cider has 1 million searches monthly with low completion for the subject.

Understand Your Goals and Measure

What is the goal of your blog? Are you building a mailing list, generating interest in a business or publishing an online magazine with your blog? Understanding your goals is vital to building a successful blog.

Some measurements of success, such as personal happiness, are hard to quantify, but others are easy using online tools such as the JetPack and Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. These two plugins will allow you to measure the number of visitors to your website and gain a better understanding of which articles they’re reading regularly.

Write Strong and Write Well

Many bloggers are not professional writers and grammar is a complex subject, but it’s vital for a successful blog to be well written with proper spelling and a respect for proper grammar. JetPack, a free plugin for WordPress, includes a built in grammar checker that helps authors catch common errors and typos.

Before you even begin to setup your WordPress blog, start writing. Content is the most important aspect of a blog and it’s also the most time consuming. Writing great content is key to launching your blog.

Write Consistently

Blogging is a way for you to share ideas, information and content with a community. Once you establish a readership it’s important that your audience receive a consistent quality of post, on a regular schedule and subject matter. Some bloggers prefer to write daily or weekly, others once a month or even at once a quarter. The schedule you post at will impact your audience size, as well as how you’re ranked in the search engines.

Establish Your Credibility

Assuming you’ve now selected a blog subject and tested to see that it has a reasonable market size, you’re ready to start blogging (sort of). Remember that blogging is about building an audience and that your expertise is being shared with other people. Write content people will benefit from and share knowledge to increase your credibility.

Build an Audience

So far, I’ve talked about how to write quality content for your blog, but to encourage people to read it is the next, vital step to running a successful blog. When you encourage visitors to come to your blog, you need to remember the goals you’ve set and what you consider a successful blog visit. If you’re writing about a subject for personal pleasure, this may not seen as important, but building an audience is at the heart of blogging for business.

You can use Google Blog Search to find similar blogs by searching for a subject under the more tab of Google to help build a network of similar blogs. Look for articles that interest you and contribute by leaving a comment, this will encourage the blog owner (as well as other readers) to visit your blog and also participate in discussions.

Become Socially Active

Linking your blog to popular social media applications is just the first step in becoming a social blogger. It should go without saying that your blog should link to Twitter and Facebook, but being a social blogger is about more than just linking to social network. Here are a few suggestions to help you along the way:

• Participate in networking events such as WordCamp and other real world activities;
• Attend local TweetUps and other events or host one in your community;
• Link to similar and source articles;
• Reply to comments and thank the community for contributing to your blog;
• Guest write for other blogs, and encourage writers to write for your blog.

Optimize for People, not Search Engines

You’ll discover a lot of content on my blog about optimizing your website for search engines. What I hope you’ll take away from the articles is that SEO isn’t really about optimizing your site for Google, it’s about helping Google read content that you’ve written well for people.

It’s important that you learn to write great titles, format your pages correctly, build deep linking structures and include keywords, however, poor articles with great SEO won’t build an audience so instead focus on writing for people, not computers.

Maintain your Blog

Remember that your blog is always growing, always changing and always needs attention. Put a couple of hours a week aside to reply to comments and update old content. Feel free to edit old posts with more updated information, add new photos or share old links that you feel are timely again.

Building a successful blog isn’t likely to happen if you simple write content and push it out to the community. You need to write content and revisit it regularly. Add links between articles to help readers find similar content, fix your mistakes when you find them and keep your blog updated with fresh, strong content regularly.