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WordPress Sitemaps

By 06/03/2016October 24th, 2017No Comments

WordPress Sitemaps

how you should get started

WP Support Services WordPress Sitemaps

First your WordPress sitemaps need a start and you will need to create an XML sitemap for your site.

We also want an HTML sitemap but we will cover that later.

I recommend using the Yoast SEO Plugin as WordPress sitemaps cannot be built by wordpress as it has no sitemap generation capability.
(If you are already using Yoast for SEO, make sure you have updated to the most recent version.)

However I also recommend adding XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress to give you 2 separate and unique sitemaps

Now if you have a particularly large website, you may also need to employ a sitemap index.

Search engines will only index the first 50,000 URLs in a sitemap, so if your site has more than 50,000 URLs, youwill need to use an index to tie multiple sitemaps together.

You can learn how to create these indices and more about sitemaps at sitemaps.org.

After you have created your wordpress sitemaps you will need to upload or register them with your various search engines. Both Google and Bing want webmasters and site owners to register there wordpress sitemaps and RSS feeds through Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Taking this step helps the search engines identify where your sitemap is so that as soon as your siteis updated, the search engine can react faster to index the new content.

Also if your using RSS feeds content curators or syndicators can automatically pull your content into their sites.

By registering your sitemap with Google and Bing and even Yahoo tells the search engine that your content has been created or updated before they find it on the other sites.

It’s really a very simple thing but many site owners forget and it really is very important.

To submit a sitemap to Google:

Ensure that the XML Sitemap is on your web server and accessible via its URL.
Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools.
Under Crawl, choose Sitemaps.
Click on the red button in the upper right marked Add/Test Sitemap.

Enter the URL of the sitemap and click Submit Sitemap.

Your Done, Google has your sitemap.

To submit a sitemap with Bing:

Ensure that the XML Sitemap is on your web server and accessible via its URL.
Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools.
Click on Configure My Site and Sitemaps.
Enter the full URL of the sitemap in the Submit a Sitemap text box.
Click Submit.

Your done Bing has your sitemap.
Another reason it is very important to register sitemaps with Google specifically is to catch Sitemap errors.

Google Webmaster Tools provides great information about the status of each Sitemap and any errors it finds.

Now about that HTML sitemap, first installWP SEO HTML Sitemap Pluginthen create a new page called Site Map, you can leave it blank.

Now go to Settings,SEO HTML Sitemap, set the sitemap page to page you created called Site Map and set Location to replace Content and Save.

You now have an HTML Site Map page.

Another helpful tip from WP Support Services.

 

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