So, Good Blogging Practice has completed its 10th post. And its getting good response around the corner. Previously Espreson discussed on basic plugins. Now it is time to move towards non-basic plugins and widgets.

Blogger wants their blog to be read by more readers. So, if you get more readers, it will automatically increase rank/position of your blog. For that you need to optimize your blog in different way. Then how to optimize? Here is a guideline,

• Generating sitemaps
• Blog/Feed Directory submission
• Social bookmarking
• Pinging
• Other methods

First our discussion will be on Sitemaps.

Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress is a kind of plugin which helps you to generate sitemaps. To view your site performance you can use Google’s webmaster tools. It shows how Google indexes and crawls your site, what are the problems in your site, how is your site performing etc.

Now the task is to install the plugin in your wp-content/plugin folder and activate it. For that you will also get detailed installation guide in Downloaded plugin’s readme file.

After activating the plugin, go to options –> sitemap, here you will find lots of optimization options like,

• Additional pages (if you want to add new page other than your blog then this is necessary otherwise not needed)
• Basic Options (here check all the options except Write a normal XML file (your filename), because normal XML sitemap is big in size compared to compressed gzipped XML sitemap, so, better left it uncheck)
• Location of your sitemap file (Go for automatic location and enter filename of sitemap as sitemap.xml, if your blog is in root directory otherwise go for manual location if your blog is in subdirectories)
• Includings (here check all the options)
• Change frequencies (as par the updation of your pages like Homepage, Posts change the settings)
• Priorities (as par change frequency give them priorities)

After doing all the changes don’t forget to click update options. Then press Rebuild Sitemap. When you find there are changes in your blogs posts, pages, categories and archieves press the Rebuild Sitemap as needed. Thats all.
So, your sitemap is ready to get crawled by search engines.

Now the task is to get detailed report of your blog performance and for that Google’s webmaster tools will be helpful. Here is the guideline how to add your sitemap in Google’s webmaster tools,

• Now go to Google’s webmaster tools and sign up with your Gmail username and password. Here you will be asked to add site.
• Just add your site on Add Site box and press OK.
• After adding the site go to Sitemaps option. Click on Add a Sitemap.
• Then choose Add General Web Sitemap. Put your sitemap URL (if your sitemap is gzipped then URL should be http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz otherwise http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml only). Sitemap URL depends upon the Basic Options of the Sitemap Generator plugin, which I have already discussed sitemap optimization options.
• Now you will get message like this You have added a Sitemap to http://yourdomain.com/. Reports may take several hours to update. Thank you for your patience!

So, sitemap generation and Google’s webmaster tools configuration are over. So, other blog Optimization topics are left..
Will be continued soon…