Lets make a sitemap

Apparently most of the search engines can make use of sitemaps, basically a .xml file with links to pages on your site, the date they were modified and some hint on how often you think the content on each of the mentioned pages will be refreshed.

I undertand why this could be a useful tool for the search engine and the site to be indexed, but as usual there are no guarantees whatsoever that it actually helps or the mentioned pages will be indexed, but it doesn’t hurt either.

As usual with wordpress, if a feature isn’t in the default installation there is a handy dandy plugin available that will do all the work for you so there is no need to learn anything about .xml or the sitemap specification or anything.

I used the Google XML Sitemaps plugin and pretty much went for the defaults. it automatically refreshes the sitemap everytime you make changes to the site and notifies the search engines, only yahoo requires you to register and apply for an application key.

the sitemap will be placed in the root of your site like this http://www.songshu.org/sitemap.xml and i’m not sure if the search engines automatically look for it, at least google, yahoo and msn have an option for you to specify the location before they actually use it i think.

So sign up with https://developer.yahoo.com and https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and specify the location for them