Further SEO-ing Your Wordpress Website / Blog

Everyone knows that Wordpress has some pretty awesome SEO capabilities, it supports meta tags, mod_rewrite to give you nice URLs, and it supports an excellent plugin that would enable you to get every single page on your installation indexed by Google, or any other search engine, not just the ones with links to them. I’m going to explain how to use it, and submit it, to make sure your website has the best SEO possible.

Firstly, you need to download the plugin, and install it. That bit is nice and simple, click here to download it; and upload it into your plugins folder etc and activate it. That’s nice and simple.
Then you need to open up notepad, or something similar, and make a blank page, save it as sitemap.xml and upload it to your site directory. Then, CHMOD it to 777 (Linux) ; that’s most of what you need to do done.

In your admin panel, if you head for Options and then select the XML Sitemap Generator tab; and deselect teh option which says “output to sitemap.xml.gz” leaving only “output to sitemap.xml” ; and then save. Then click the “Generate Sitemap Manually” button, and the sitemap is done. You should then be able to visit yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and see everything on your install there :)

Last stage, submitting to Google. Head to the Google webmaster tools (here) , sign up, add and confirm your site, then click the Sitemaps option on the left. Submit the URL to your sitemap there, and Google will index every page on your site, just like that :)

That should help you get every single one of your pages on Google, which is an important part of SEO :) Other websites will follow shortly afterwards, like Yahoo and MSN.