Yakiji (Yah-key-jee)

If you haven’t heard already, Google, MSN, and Yahoo have joined forces in support for a single xml sitemap format – Sitemaps 0.9. In the easiest terms, sitemaps are xml formatted files that provide a way for a website to list the URLs (along with related data) so that search engine spiders can index the website in the easiest way possible. It’s basically an easier way for us (webmasters) to talk to search engines and recommend to how we’d like to have our websites crawled. This is great news! There is now a common sitemap protocol which will alleviate the drudginess of having to create different sitemaps for each search engine. In light of this merging of forces, the big three (Google, MSN, and Yahoo) have announced the launch of www.sitemaps.org, which will provide details of the current release of the Sitemaps protocol and will include future updates.

OK, so now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to create an xml sitemap. This can easily be done in notepad if you have a site with a small amount of pages (50 or less). You just need to follow the correct protocol (syntax). On the other hand, if you’re working with a site larger than 50 pages, then you may want to consider a sitemap generator. Google provides a long list of third-party recommendations. My personal favorite is www.XML-Sitemaps.com. It’s as simple and inserting your domain and letting it take care of the rest. Depending on how big your site is, you may need to wait for a bit. Once finished, it will spit out a fully formatted and compliant sitemap in several different formats of your choosing (up to 500 URLs). Go ahead and check it out!

Sitemap Generator – www.XML-Sitemaps.com

Related Links:
Google Sitemaps
Yahoo Sitemaps
Sitemap Protocol
Third-Party Sitemap Tools

If you haven’t heard of or used Wordpress yet, then you are one of few in the web world. After reading a recent posting in the Sitepoint Forums asking web developers to supply their Wordpress SEO checklists, I decided to post my own.

After installing Wordpress, download and install the following plugins:

• Google XML Sitemaps – to auto-generate XML sitemaps when new content is created.
  
• All in One SEO Pack – automatically optimizes your blog for search engines.
  
• Category Base Killer – removes the “category/” base text from the URL string.
• Wordpress.com Stats – quick and simple stats that are important to your blog.
  

Contributing factors:

• .htaccess: force the www rewrite for your website so all the urls.
  #Force www domain
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [nc]
  RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
  #End force www
• XHTML/CSS: Develop a wordpress theme that has clean XHTML with semantic tags and clean CSS.
• Robots.txt: identify your sitemap and make sure your content is crawled correctly with the robots.txt file. Be sure to disallow the “wp-admin” directory.
• Permalinks: set to custom use %postname%. Ultilize keywords in your URL.
• More Tag: utilize the more tag so your entire post doesn’t show up on your homepage and it’s own page.

Useful Links and Resources:

• Wordpress SEO Checklist (SitePoint Forums)
• Ultimate Wordpress SEO Guide (ToddW Blog)
• Pushing Wordpress SEO Boundaries (Andy Beard)