To increase our traffic, we have to take advantage of search engines, who bring a non-negligible traffic to the blog. And for that, there are several methods available to us and among others, we have the sitemap.
The latter is a detailed plan of your blog (Articles + pages), generally used by search engines. Indeed, to better index our content, it is preferable to present to the robot the content that they must take into consideration.
Believe me, we all benefit from creating a sitemap for our website. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create the sitemap of your blog with the plugin Google XML Sitemaps.
Please note: : Do not be fooled by the name of this plugin, Google is not the only one to make use of sitemaps, other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo also use them.
We will start with Install the plugin, Which is available on WordPress.org.
After activation, go to the plugin configuration interface on the dashboard: " Settings >> XML-Sitemap ". The default configurations of the plugin are acceptable, but I will explain some options.
"Basic Options" section
On notifications, the first two options (activated), inform search engines that there is something new (Content) on your blog, so these options should remain enabled. For other options in the same section, they do not need to be configured.
Section "Additional page"
This section allows you to manually add pages to the sitemap. This option will allow you to add content in the sitemap that was not generated by WordPress. Click on " Add a new page ". Regarding the fields:
- The URL must be of the type http://www.exemple.com/mon-contenu
- Priority will allow search engines to give more importance to a page, it will be up to you to define which pages are important. But to help you I will say that the hierarchically superior pages (parent page or subpage) must have a higher priority.
- You will also need to define how often the page will be updated and manually set the date of the last change.
Section "Item priority"
You can define the visibility of an article by calculating its priority on the basis of the comments, for that, you must check the option " Comments " or " Average review , But these options will cause your server to work harder than usual.
"Sitemap content" section
In this section, you can determine what will be included in the sitemap. By default, the home page, articles and static pages are included. If it is true that the options checked are sufficient, you can still include additional content.
"Data to exclude" section
In this section you will be able to exclude certain categories. You will also be able to exclude certain items in the field " Exclude items By adding the identifiers of these articles.
To retrieve the ID of your page or article, simply open the article in question (in preview mode of a draft) and copy the number following the word "post =" "
"Edit frequencies" section
In this section, you can determine how often each content is updated. Depending on this frequency, search engines may adopt a frequency of visit.
From my experiences, I have realized that if a piece of content that is supposed to be updated every day is not updated for a long time, then Google will change the frequency of visits to this page to " once a day ».
Priorities section
As I just explained to you, the hierarchically superior content (pages, categories, blog home, keywords) should be given a high priority according to the importance you assign to them. The defaults are fine, but you can change them to change the behavior of search engines.
Once it's done, save your changes. In case of concern with the configurations, you can click on " Reset options ". Consult your sitemap by entering the following address: http://votrenomdedomaine.com/sitemap.xml. Your sitemap will look like this:
That's it for this tutorial, if you want to learn more about search engine optimization I invite you to read this tutorial on "All In One Seo Pack".
Thank you for this precise and practical tutorial.
Bonsoir
I just set up and updated the xml Sitemap Generator for WordPress 4.1.0 and here is what I just received by visiting my site map:
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 4 at column 6: XML declaration at the beginning of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error. "
Do you know where it can come from?
please
Hello Patrice,
No idea yet. But I'll do a search. You can also do one on Google to try to find the problem.
Already, what sitemap plugin do you use?
Perfect!
On the other hand my extension is in English while yours is in French ... any idea where it could come from? My blog is well configured as a French blog, however…
Good evening, this can happen in 3 situations:
- The plugin is not correctly translated
- Your site is in English
- Your plugin is not up to date and does not have the language update
Thank you !!! Super tuto, you saved my day
Hello Chloe,
Nothing, all the fun is for us.
Thank you for the detailed explanations which will be very useful to me.