Important of Sitemap, How to Create Sitemap For Wordpress?

Heard before sitemap? Did you understand the important of sitemap? and what therole of sitemap?

Long time ago, when I visit some cooperate website, I always see a “sitemap” link, in that page, it show all the website link, that time I was thinking does the webmaster create sitemap for visitor to view the summary of the website? I also thinking how come webmaster do double job, since the index (main page) already can found all the link such as “Product”, “Service”, “Company info” bla bla bla, and how come sitemap show it again…

I get this theory over some SEO consultant, they said Search Engine’s (SE) Spider or bot visit a website, can not crawl the website more then 3 level/ 3 page deep. Meaning that those content that I post week ago, or month ago or even year ago are unable to crawl from the spider, but sitemap show all the link, the spider can crawl all the page.

Seriously after I create a sitemap for iCalvyn.com, and submit my sitemap to google, the traffic increase time to time.

I found that google spider come to my website 3 time a month (March08 statistic) and my google traffic raise from 50/days to 100/days on that month.

Now, google come to crawl my website when I make a new post. Traffic raise to 600-800/days (November08 statistic)

If you are using wordpress, you require to use plugin to create sitemap, I will talk about how to create sitemap at joomla and other system soon, lets start with wordpress 1st.

How to create a Sitemap for WordPress?

1. Download Google XML Sitemap Generator,
2. After upload the plugin, and activate it
3. go to “Setting”, on “XML-Sitemap”
4. Select the basic setting, or use the default setting, and update the option.

Once u setup this plugin, you will see this red massage:

There was a problem writing your sitemap file. Make sure the file exists and is writable

There was a problem writing your zipped sitemap file. Make sure the file exists and is writable

When you come to this section, some of the blogger will found difficulties to create the sitemap, you require to create a “sitemap.xml” file and “sitemap.xml.gz” file and upload it into the public_html directory.

How to create sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz ?

If you do not know how to create “sitemap.xml” file and “sitemap.xml.gz”, simply open a notepad, save file as “sitemap.xml” and another one save file as “sitemap.xml.gz“

Upload it to ur webhosting public_html directory, you definitely found the same issue,

There was a problem writing your sitemap file. Make sure the file exists and iswritable

There was a problem writing your zipped sitemap file. Make sure the file exists and is writable

The sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz are not writable yet, to change the ftp file permission to become writable, click on the file, and edit the CHMOD

it require to be writable on this 2 file. You need to change the this the FTP file permission to become writable, or “777″

Once done, both file are writable. You can update the option or rebuild sitemap manually

Finish every thing, check your sitemap at :

http://www.YourDomainName.com/sitemap.xml

http://www.iCalvyn.com/sitemap.xml

Yeah  above address are my blog sitemap, you can have a look on how it is.

Extra Tips: 
Well, after finish create the sitemap, to optimize your sitemap address, it is advice to put this link at your index page. The reason putting the sitemap over your website is to let the search engine crawler access the sitemap when it come to visit your website.

Creating a sitemap does not mean you will get crawl by search engine if your website does not get any back link from other website. Other then this, you can also submit your sitemap to major search engine in the world. I will explain more on how to submit sitemap to Google, Yahoo and also MSN in the near future, stay tune