I have been gaming the search engines as a search engine marketer or seo consultant for quite a few years now. The game has always been about Google for me and I was happy to pick up great results in major engines like Yahoo and MSN as a bonus. The reasons are obvious, Google has the greatest volume of traffic and even better is that I have found it converts better for me as well.
When I began building WordPress blogs and customizing them for better search engine results I had no idea of the number of great add ons or “plugins” as they are called. Using a site like WP Plugins I have found an incredible assortment of plugins designed for seo and all of them are great but I think one of the better ones I use now has to be the Google Sitemaps plugin.
For the first few years of my seo work a sitemap and proper internal navigation were lots of work. I manually updated most of my pages and whenever I wanted to make changes there was a lot of repetitive copy paste. Maintaining a proper sitemap was an important chore. Organizing hundreds of individual pages and keeping track of things like url changes or modifying anchor text was a real pain. This handy little tool takes the guess work out of building a decent sitemap for Google.
Google recognizes a specific Sitemap Protocol as described here:
The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size. It also enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
The Google Sitemap Protocol has recently been accepted by both Yahoo and MSN as an industry standard. You can view more details and the latest version of Sitemap Protocol 0.9 at http://www.sitemaps.org/
Installing the Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress from http://www.arnebrachhold.de was as easy as uploading the file and clicking Activate. The plugin installs and configures itself to produce an updated sitemap.xml file in your root directory every time you post to your blog. Whether adding a new post or page the sitemap automatically updates and includes your entry for the search engines to conveniently read in a standardized format. Thats simply sweet by itself but it also pings the google servers to let them know whats up.
Thats the best thing I ever heard of as far as seo tools goes. I mean that. What other tool can be more valuable? The goal has always been to get Google to recognize my content and properly index it. Now we have a tool that will notify Google I have just posted this lovely unique article to my blog and they can run over and check it out, cache a copy and label it as mine before any content scrapers can steal my work and claim it as their own. Google gets exactly what they want, fresh update and unique content from a now known and trusted source. Outside of some keyword research, which I never really bother with, proper content formatting and succesful organic link building I could do no more for my site as far as seo work is concerned. Can I?
Tags: Affordable Web, Plugins, Wordpress
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