Google Sitemaps
Now that this site has a decent number of pages on it, it’s ready to submit to search engines and directories. I followed a great article in the WordPress Codex on WordPress search engine optimization. Submitted the site to some directories and search engines, ensured the existence of good meta tags, and have been writing good, descriptive links and link titles.
While reading the Codex article, I learned about the new Google sitemaps feature. This is interesting — a protocol for describing the pages on your site, their importance, and their volatility, all in an XML file. This becomes more useful with the ability to notify Google of updates to this file by hitting (pinging) a certain Google URL.
It would certainly be a lot of tedious work to maintain such an XML file by hand. That’s where WordPress plugins step in and really shine. The Codex lists quite a few Google Sitemaps plugins that generate sitemaps for your WordPress site with varying degrees of automation and flexibility.
I chose Arne Brachhold’s Google Sitemap Generator. It auto-calculates post importance based on comment activity, allows full customization of importance levels for categories, pages, posts, etc., automatically rebuilds the XML whenever you change a page or post, and auto-pings Google when it updates the sitemap. Very nice plugin, I recommend it.
There seem to be many other Google Sitemap tools out there for the different web site CMS/scripting languages/blog applications/site architectures out there. I don’t think Google sitemaps are meant to solve any problem bigger than web crawler optimization, and will play only a small part in increasing the saturation of good semantic information on the web. But with tools as configurable and automated as Arne Brachhold’s plugin out there, I recommend Google Sitemaps to anyone willing to spend a few minutes to improve their online searchability and presence.