They should, but if they don’t, move on to another company. This is too important, and you shouldn’t have to do this on your own.
91% of people don’t go past the first page of Google’s search results. If your website isn’t on the first page, you’re missing out on the majority of potential clients.
Yes, we know. They’ve told you to optimize your website, use effective keywords, take advantage of Google Adwords, and more. All of this is important—But, unless they know how to set up sitemaps properly on Word Press, your competitors will get their sites ahead of yours.
How Google Works
Google relies on automated programs (search spiders called Googlebots) to scour the Internet and report the content of websites to search engines. Then, they index sites they deem “worthy” to feed into their search results. This is where the importance of sitemaps comes into play.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are a great tool for directing search spiders. Creating them for your website is a must. These sitemaps provide Google’s robots with a detailed map of your site. Instead of having to crawl manually to locate internal links to your content, your sitemaps tell the crawler where every public page is on your website is. This helps to boost your SEO rankings.
Years ago, sitemaps were hand-coded in HTML format, and their main purpose was to simplify site navigation. Sitemaps have evolved a lot since then. Today they’re published in XML, and their goal is to improve search engine optimization by helping search engines crawl a site intelligently.
XML sitemaps contain information about your pages and posts when a particular page was last modified, the priority of pages, and how frequently a page is expected to undergo changes.
Google’s search engine looks for two basic pieces of information in your sitemap:
- URLs In XML sitemaps that can be fetched by their Googlebot. Don’t include URLs that are disallowed by the robots.txt file. All of your URLs should be canonical. This way they tell search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. This prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs. The canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results.
- Modification time. So, specifying this against each URL is important. It should be updated every time a meaningful change is made to a page.
WordPress
WordPress is very well-coded which is why many call it SEO-friendly. It comes with built-in SEO features, and it should be an essential part of your SEO strategy. It naturally structures your content by organizing it into pages, blog posts, blog categories and tags.
WordPress enables you to add a sitemap to their page using one simple shortcode. Adding the shortcode automatically generates a sitemap of your site and displays it on the page.
How to Set Up Sitemaps with WordPress.
WordPress comes ready to use for boosting your search engine results. Its functions guide a search engine through your posts, pages, and categories and compile the information needed to include your site within its database.
To add a sitemap to your WordPress site, install and activate the WordPress SEO plugin. By default, WordPress SEO doesn’t enable XML sitemap functionality, so you must turn it on.
Tips:
- Make sure you have a list of your website's "addresses/URLs" on hand. You can submit your root directory as well as specific categories and feeds to search engines, expanding your search engine coverage.
- Make sure you have good content for search engines to scan. You want more than 10 posts on your site to give the search engines something to examine and evaluate.
- Have ready to type, or copy and paste, the title of the site, and the categories your site may belong to in a search engine directory.
- Keep notes on the various search engines and directories you submit to so you do not accidentally resubmit too soon.
Now, Here’s What to Do.
- Open WordPress.
- Go to the XML Sitemap
- Check the box to enable SML sitemap functionality.
- Don’t exclude anything.
- Change the Max entries per sitemap page from 1000 to 2500.
- Check Ping Yahoo! And Ping Ask.com.
- Save Changes
Now, click the XML sitemap. Here you’ll see the sitemap files you’ve set up.
Now, include more:
- Copy the last part of your webpage address- the “slug” (e.g., https://buffalocomputerhelp.com/post-sitemap.xml)
- Go into your Sitemaps page and paste it into Add/Test Sitemaps.
- Refresh and you’ll see it added on the Sitemap page.
Do this for other pages as you wish.
Easy, right? If you can do this, your MSP marketing company surely can. But many don’t.
If you want to move on to an MSP Marketing Company that will do all this and more, contact Stuart Crawford at Ulistic at 855-964-2608 ext. 101, or at: info@ulistic.com