Successful Blogging Tips #06
Adding A Sitemap To Your Blog:
Adding a sitemap to you blog gives Google an accurate roap map to finding all your pages and posts within your blog. In layman terms, a sitemap gives Google a huge list of all your post and pages, making it extremely easy for their Googlebots to crawl and index. This article will teach both Blogger.com bloggers as well as self-hosted Wordpress.org bloggers how to add a sitemap to their blogs. If this gets to confusing for you guys, please let me know and I will create two seperate posts, one that covers Blogger.com and the other that covers Wordpress.org. I tried to kill two birds with one stone here, so let me know if you have trouble. Be sure to comment and ask for help if you need it. I am here to help!
Let’s begin!
For Wordpress and Blogger.com Bloggers
Step One: For both Wordpress.org and Blogger.com blogs, add your blog into your webmaster tools dashboard.
Step Two: Verify your site. This can be done by adding a special meta tag into your header file:
This special Meta Tag is generated by google. Simply copy and paste this code into your blog.
Next step for only BLOGGER.COM BLOGGERS
To add this special Meta Tag to your blogger.com blog follow these steps:
- Open your blogger.com dashboard.
- Navigate to the Template tab
- Open “edit HTML” sub menu tab
Add the special meta tag as seen in the example above to here:
You want to paste the special meta tag code directly below the <head> tag in your blogger.com HTML template file.
Save the template. and then your changes will be saved!
Next Step For Self Wordpress.org Bloggers
Step One: Download this plugin. CLICK HERE
Step Two: Unzip the download and then FTP the entire folder and contents within the folder into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Step Three: Open up your wp-admin dashboard and navigate your plugins tab:
Scroll down and look for the plugin to appear in your list and then activate:
In this example, I have already activated the plugin.
Step Four: Navigate to your options and then sitemap tab:
and then click rebuild…. you are done!
You are done! You can now view your sitemap by visiting:
www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
Next Step For Blogger and Wordpress Bloggers
At this point in time, I have shown both Blogger.com bloggers as well as self hosted Wordpress.org bloggers how to add a sitemap into their blogs, then next and final stages are to complete your verification in Google Webmasters and link up your sitemap… so here goes!
Step One: Go Back To Your Google Webmasters Dashboard and complete the verification:
After you click verify you will see this screen:
You have now successfully verified your site into your Google Webmaster Dashboard.
Step Two: Add your sitemap!
Blogger.com Bloggers Type This
http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Wordpress.org Bloggers Type This
http://yourblog.com/sitemap.xml
Then click Add Web SiteMap and you are done!
Successful Blogging Tips Sponsors:
If you would like for me to mention your site here, please write a brief article about my site on yours. Be sure to contact me and let me know and I will mention you in my next Successful Blogging Tips post. I have 94 more to go!
Popularity: 5% [?]
33 comments
Hi Garry,
Thanks for the tip! I’m not very technical but was able to follow your instructions successfully. Is there any way to measure the effects of my sitemap? Is there anything I should do from a content standpoint to take advantage of the sitemap? Thanks again, Brad
So Blogger automatically makes a sitemap (atom) I don’t know why Google don’t mention this in an easy to find place. WebMaster tools keep asking about a sitemap but I had no idea how to make one.
Your wordpress verify is for wordpress.org, if you have a wordpress.com blog you can still verify.
Click on the link that says “Verify your siteâ€Â
You will be required to choose one of the verification methods. Choose “Upload an HTML file†(not Meta tag as Garry mentioned) and you will be told to upload a file with name similar to “google12345ad9d1bcb791.htmlâ€Â.
Leave the Window opened and open the Wordpress.com Dashboard. Navigate through the links to create a new PAGE. Give the page title as the name of the HTML that Google gave and press on “Publish†and your page gets published.
Click the “Verify†button on the Google page and it is verified.
Different sites I have been to say it stays verified but it didn’t for me. I have found that it only stays verified for some time (week or so) so you can, instead of deleting the page mark it as “Draft†and publish it whenever you need to re-verify and then again mark it as Draft. A bit of a pain but a least you can do it.
hope it helps someone.
– GoldCoaster
That is a huge pain in the butt. That is one of the many reasons why I don’t provide much support for Wordpress.com.
For one, they don’t allow bloggers to make money online… yet, they allow for questionable content to be accessible on their servers, such as terrorist supporter sites, and two, they don’t allow you any ability to do advanced customizations.
We really need to get you moved to a dot Com site. Let me know if you plan on doing this in the near future and I will help you get things set up for you.
That is great to hear! I am glad that I was able to illustrate what to do successfully. Once Google approves your site map you are good to go! You can also provide a direct link to your site map from your home page if you want to. Keep in mind though, when people view it, it will look sort of like this:
Thats right, you can’t do much customising with wordpress unless you pay them some money (still can’t have ads though)
The added page to verify is so bad but it’s a pain if it doesn’t stick and you need to do over and over everyweek – I don’t bother but some might.
I still think wordpress is miles above blogger though.
I would love to go to a hosted site but I am guessing all links, page ranks, visitors etc disappear and I pretty much would have to start from scratch again
I wouldn’t really know where to start – plans/hosting/wordpress???
Pity Goldcoaster is taken on the .coms
I take it that the sitemap plugin for wordpress contantly updates the sitemap xml?
Great thanks Garry! Worked like a charm
You are very welcome! I am happy to hear that adding the sitemap to you blog went smoothly.
Thank you so much Garry.
Now I can get busy on that today. See, I knew you’d know what it was and would help us out. I’m just so glad to know I’m not the only one that had no clue how to do one.
Oh I don’t believe this at all!!
Thank you so much Garry! I now realise that I’ve had Google Sitemap plugin installed on my blog since I started it about 3 months ago and also set up Google Webmaster Tools at the same time, however I’d never actually specified in the address of the sitemap!
Will this go towards helping my Google ranking for keywords, does this have a a noticeable effect?
Thanks again!
Zath, you are welcome. A sitemap is basically a very well written road map that shows Google where everything is at on your website. It makes the job of a Googlebot much easier and helps assure that more of your posts and pages get indexed.
Is this how you promote your 1 dollar blogs ?
i’m really curious how did you get traffic to your 1 dollar blogs. did you choose a high paying non competitive word ? or you did it the other way 
please share your tips. you can also mail me
Thank you and keep up the good work
Great post Garry.. I actually found that I had forgotten to create a Sitemap (I know it’s such a lame excuse) when I ran the Website Grader tool. I have just posted my findings and it might help a lot of people to have a quick look at a lot of facts about their blogs. Take a peek at my post from yesterday if you are interested..
I gotta roll up my sleeves and get this done this weekend. With Google indexing just my home page, I actually wondered why my search engine hits have been so low!! How silly of me..
Not sure why the url got messed up but it is www dot websitegrader dot com. :-p
I use a sitemap and its very useful.
Thank you very much for great tutorial! I’ve created sitemap for my blog using it easy and fast!
No problem, I fixed it for you. You forgot to add the http:// in the hyperlink. All is good though, I got it updated for you.
I can tell that you have Kyle have been spending time together. LOL!!!
The website grader tool is tons of fun! How did you do, I scored a 95%. If I had done that well in high school, I probably wouldn’t be blogging!
I couldn’t agree more. Mine wasn’t updated for a few months because I had for some reason turned my plugin off, I turned it on a few days ago and rebuilt it and next thing I know, I am ranked on Google first page for “successful blogging tips“. This is great because only about a week ago, I didn’t show up at all. A few days ago I was on page three, and now I am on page one. Last night I was ranked 9th on the front page and this morning I am ranked 5th. I am very pleased with this because that is totally what my site is about: Providing bloggers with advice and guidance towards finding success with blogging.
wow, it was so easy (if I did it right) that it only took less than 5 minutes to do all my blogs.
Thanks for the tip! Followed to add sitemap to good effect.
[...] Conn teaches you how to add a Sitemap to your blog (for both Wordpress and Blogger [...]
I am at 80% now. Still have a few kinks to work out. Okay.. may be you can help me out a little with this!
I added a sitemap at http://www.shankrila.com/sitemap.xml (manually with the Google Sitemaps plugin) and uploaded it to Webmaster tools. I made the preferred domain as http://www.shankrila.com instead of shankrila.com. Or is it better to have it the other way around?
Google is finding some errors as the sitemaps file has some of the posts indexed as shankrila.com. I’m just learning how to work this magic.
Thanks Garry!
What are some of the errors you are getting?
Do you generate your sitemap with the “www” or without it? Also, do you set the preference in Webmaster tools for the preferred domain?
Paths don't match
We've detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that includes the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap don't use the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/myfile.htm).
Thanks to Kyle, I do have the Permalink Redirect plugin installed in Wordpress and I might have to take a closer look at it and see if I need any of the setting changed in there.
Ok, I just made a comment to thank-you but it didn’t show up (or I just didn’t do it right).
Anyway, thank-you for taking the time to do a step by step instruction (along with screenshots) on how to add metatags to get a blog verified with Google.
I appreciate it.
Erin
http://www.sharingmytwocents.com
[...] Webmaster Guidelines | Duplicate Content, Google Webmaster Help Center | Adding A Sitemap To Your Blog, Garry Conn | Make Wordpress Search Engine Friendly, Wolf-Howl SEO Blog | Search Engines Unite on Sitemaps [...]
[...] If you use Wordpress, you can find information about adding sitemap.xml by visiting this page and this page. [...]
[...] And a path for the horse to get to the food (sitemap.xml) [...]
Hi Garry,
Followed both your posts on and Meta Titles and Description and Site Map. The only thing is i have had a error 404 message saying can not index url as robots are restricting it.When i look at my Html code there is nothing written about robots, is there anything i can do to get google to index my blogpage
Regards
Paolo
I’m stuck at Step 2: After selected “Add General Site Web”, I typed in “atom.xml/” in the box provided. And this is the remark I got:
“The Sitemap must be located at http://so-stylo.blogspot.com/. To add a Sitemap at http://so-stylo.blogspot.com/atom.xml/, first add that site to your account and then click the Add a Sitemap link beside it.”
What should I do now?
Leave a Comment