Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

When I was doing some research for some content, I decided to see if other blogs had written on the topic. This led me to several blogs, and an unexpected discovery.

When I write a post, I like to see if others are dealing with my topic. In part, it is to ensure that I am not rehashing well covered material, and in part, it is to see that I would be moving the topic forward. On one site, I went to look at the sitemap, because I was curious about the posts, and I wanted to get a quick overview. I was foiled. There was no link to the sitemap, and I could not pull one up.

    Iclaim no great knowledge to SEO insights, so I cannot speak to all of the advantages to having a sitemap, or making it available to your visitors. I can speak to my experience though. A really good SEO pointed out to me that I did not have a link to my sitemap, and I added it right after his pronouncement. I did not think of it at first. I did start looking at different sitemaps after that. What I came to realize is that they did make it easier for users to find some pages/posts on websites. This may not be a convenience that all users desire; it does leave a good impression on those who do want it.

   Most of our search traffic does come from one search engine. Submitting your content to it to be indexed makes sense. There are many search engines though. You cannot submit to all of them. By having a link to your sitemap allows them to index your site. For me, it seems that having a link to your sitemap shows that you and your blog are serious about having your site discovered. It helps create an image of professionalism and authority.

    With a WordPress blog, creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google is quite simple; you add a plug-in. If you go to the Plugins directory of your admin section, you will see that you can choose the option to add a new plugin. This will bring you to a page with a search box. Type in “sitemap generator” (or you can look at my plugins post to find the one that I use). Follow the instructions to add and activate the plugin. Once it has generated a sitemap for you, you can create a link in one of your php files. The plugin page will give you the link (it is usually http://example.com/sitemap.xml/). A typical place for this link will be in the footer.php or in the sidebar.php, particularly under the meta section. Just create the link with the title “sitemap”- no reason to hide it with any other terminology.

   If you do not have a sitemap linked, you may consider adding it. Considering that there is a plugin to make everything in our lives with our WordPress site easier, we should take advantage of it.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

One Response to “Do I need a sitemap? Should I link to it?”