Now before you submit your website, it is important to generate sitemap. The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines (not only Google) about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. It is made of XML file listing all the files in your website indicating their importance (priority) and  change frequency.

Here is a sample Sitemap XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-10-13T12:28:17+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
 
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/privacy-policy/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-10-14T04:40:51+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/2009/10/top-5-wordpress-plug-in-for-internet-marketing-all-in-one-seo-pack/</loc>
 
		<lastmod>2009-10-13T12:28:17+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.4</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/2009/08/fighting-adblock/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-10-13T04:58:18+00:00</lastmod>
 
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.2</priority>
	</url>
 
        <!-- cutting off . It's too long to show here -->
 
	<url>
		<loc>http://wpmarketing.org/about/</loc>
		<lastmod>2009-08-05T12:08:20+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>
	</url>
 
</urlset>

Basically, it is not that difficult to create the file, but tedious and lots of labor may be involved if done by hand manually. Especially for the blog site with frequent article posting, you will need a plug-in for that which would update the Sitemap automatically. So here is Google XML Sitemaps plug-in.

Basically his plug-in will create a XML-Sitemap of your Wordpress blog. It will include all the Wordpress pages and posts and even external pages that you defined. The sitemap is automatically updated whenever you modify any page or post, so it’s just convenient. It also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com automatically. You can’t ask for more.

It works pretty well right after the activation, but it is possible that you may need to create a file named sitemap.xml and/or sitemap.xml.gz in your Wordpress root path and make them writable by webserver (If you are using Hosting providers with up-to-date system, you wouldn’t have problem).  And the default settings are good enough so you should not do anything else. But if you want to rebuild the sitemap, click on the ‘rebuild the sitemap manually’ link marked with Red box in the above image.

By default, Google XML sitemaps is automatically calculate the priority of each posts using the comment count of the posts. If you want to custom define the priority,  you can select ‘Do not use automatic priority calculation’ option in the ‘Post Priority’ group box.

Then you can use Priorities group box to specify custom priorities.

You can easily check the sitemap by adding ‘sitemap.xml’ at the end of your Wordpress URL. For example , http://wpmarketing.org/sitemap.xml . Here is the output.

Now that you have the sitemap ready,  you can go to your Google Webmaster Tool account and add your sitemap.

One extra feature would be nice – To be able to define priority per post and page. I hope the author is planning to add this feature soon.

Next plug-in will be about Plug-in for Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free web statistics application provided Google.

Thank you for visiting wpmarketing.org

* Google XML Sitemaps Website : http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

* References: List of other Sitemap generator tools (Not just for Wordpress): http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

Related posts:

1. Top 5 Wordpress Plug-in for Internet Marketing – All in One SEO Pack
2. Fantastico WordPress Installation and Wordpress Privacy Settings
3. Redirection 301 and 302 and Google

1. All in One SEO Pack : SEO is important. It’s the most important part of the website maintenance. and the most difficult. Main SEO tasks consist of managing title tag, and keyword  and description meta tag. Especially I think title tag and description meta tag are important.  ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plug-in make it very easy to maintain out of the box. You can define title , keyword, and description not only for your blog but for every articles using the article’s content. You can specifically define them manually or the plug-in will automatically generate them using tags and categories.  This is the most popular plug-in for SEO.

Once activated you will need to update the settings in the ‘All in One SEO’ sub menu under Settings. You will need to select enable and fill out the Home Title, Description, and Keywords.  For the other options, you can just use the default settings.

I think more important feature is that you can define individual settings per post. Without this feature, a Wordpress blog will have the same keyword and descriptions throughout all the sub pages. That’s really terrible for the SEO.

There are other numerous SEO plug-ins in the Wordpress website. ‘Headspace’ is another popular SEO plugin-in, but it’s a little bit more complicated than ‘All in One SEO’. 

I highly recommend ‘All in One SEO’ and you will see the results right away if your website has not been SEO optimized before. I had an experience that the traffic was increased about 20% after the plug-in installation. Be patient, the traffic increase was started about a week later.

If you know any other good SEO plug-in, let me know.

Next plug-in is about Google Analytics.

Thank you for visiting wpmarketing.org

Related posts:

1. Top 5 Wordpress Plug-in for Internet Marketing – Google XML Sitemaps
2. Keywords meta tags wasted
3. Internet Marketing and Search Engine Glossary

1. PHP code content evaluation
Some modification on PHP evaluation that you can use <?php and ?> within the entry content for PHP evaluation.

So, in the previous version, if you wanted PHP code output, you could not use <?php and ?>. But now you can use them inside the entry item.

Previously you could only define PHP codes only.

print "<div style='border:1px dotted red; padding: 5px;'>";
print date("m/d/Y H:i:s");
print "</div>";

But now, below code will work too.

<div style='border:1px dotted red; padding: 5px;'>
<?php print date("m/d/Y H:i:s");?>
</div>

2. Custom ShortCode
Also extra feature for custom short code is added. You can define your own custom short code prefix and post fix. So you don’t have to use [hana-code-insert] shortcode any more.

If defined, custom short code format can be used instead of [hana-code-insert name='Entry Name' /]. For example, if you define {{ for start indicator, }} for end indicator, you can use {{Entry Name}}. But beware, your new shortcode format may conflict with other plugins and cause one or more plugins to fail.

There are some restrictions. ^ and \ characters are not allowed. And start and end indicators should not be used part of entry name. HTML comment tag is a good candidate for the customs shortcodes indicators. (Start indicator <!-- , End indicator : -->) In this way, even if the Hana Code Insert is disabled, these shortcodes will not show this way.

Hana Code Insert Admin Setting Screen.

Some of the tested custom Short Codes in a post.

===================
[[testing123]]
===================
~~testing123~~
===================
{{testing123}}
===================
This time it uses html comment.
<!-- testing123 -->
===================
 
[ hana-code-insert name='testing123' /]

Below is the output. Note that [hana-code-insert] always works regardless of whether using customs shortcode or not.

I am planning to implement Text Widget Support and enhancement in the Admin settings screen in the next version. (Additional description to recognize code snippet better, Search Fuction, etc..)

Enjoy! Let me know if you experience any problem.

Related posts:

1. Hana Code Insert Example 1: List of sub pages or sub categories

First, you need to install Hana Code Insert Plugin.

Once you installed and activated the plugin, visit the Settings => Hana Code Insert option page. Activate the ‘Enable PHP Execution ‘ check box. You need to enable this checkbox to use PHP. Then create an entry by inserting below code This is to show sub page of the current post.

You should not define <?php or ?> and need to enable ‘Evaluate as php code’ when you create the code entry. Please refer to below image for more info.

This function will allow to show the list sub pages. Please note that $post variable has to be defined with ‘global’ modifier. The current post’s ID number is used as one of the function argument.

global $post;
$children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->ID.'&echo=0');
if ($children) {
   echo "<ul>$children</ul>";
}

Now once you created the code entry, insert the hana code short code in the parent page.

Then click on the Hana Code Button to insert the code that we just created.

This is the output.

Just like this, you can show the list of categories or sub categories within a post or page.

//Shows full list categories except 10.
echo "<ul>";
wp_list_categories('orderby=name&show_count=1&exclude=10'); 
echo "</ul>";
//Shows the child categories of category 8.
echo "<ul>";
wp_list_categories('orderby=id&show_count=1&use_desc_for_title=0&child_of=8'); 
echo "</ul>";

Category ID or Page ID can be found by inspecting the URL of category or page edit links.

For more informaiton, here are the wordpress reference pages for wp_list_pages and wp_list_categories function.
http://codex.wordpress.org/wp_list_pages
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories

Hana Code Insert Forum

Related posts:

1. Hana Code Insert v2.2

It’s probably because your Privacy Settings is set to search engine “blocking” mode which says “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”.

You should click on the Settings , Privacy menu , and allow search engines by selecting “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” option.

I have been using Wordpress and performed installation several times in the past using the Wordpress default installation index.php file. But decided to try Fantastico this time because it simplifies the setup process. There is no separate DB setup process , quicker and faster setup. I liked it. But then I guess Fantastico’s Wordpress predefined options for privacy setting was to block search engines.

Usually you would start promoting your website by submitting your site to Search engines Directories and social bookmarking websites. Then search engines would crawl to your website and index pages within few days.  But I found the problem when my new website not being indexed , but also AdSense was not working at all.

The AdSense AD always showed Public Ads. As long as I understand, public Ads are showing when Google does not properly analyzed the webpage yet. Then I checked with Webmaster tools and I found robots.txt was blocking the webbots from crawling.

I am not sure if this behavior is only applied to Hostgator, but highly possible that most of the other hosting provider’s Fantastico might be the same, installing Wordpress with blocking mode.  So be careful and check privacy setting after installation if you use other similar setup tools to install Wordpress.

If you use the original setup that comes with Wordpress zip package, it asks for the privacy settings during the setup. I guess simpler is not always the better.

Some ways to check your websites heath.

1. Check if your site is properly cached in the search engine: For Google Search, you can use special search command “site:” to find out if your website is properly indexed with the Google. (Eg. “site:wpmarketing.org”) If you searched your domain with “site:” prefix and no results came out, you should suspect and check your robots.txt

2. Check your robots.txt file : Wordpress automatically generates ‘robots.txt’ when Permalink is on. It’s not an actual physical file, but Wordpress is dynamically generating when requested. You can view the file by typing ‘robots.txt’ (Eg. http://wpmarketing.org/robots.txt )  Below example shows a sample robots.txt file content which is opened to Search Engines. Note that there is nothing showing right after “Disallow:” which is OK. If there is slash ‘/’ character showing after “Disallow:”, It means to disallow all content from being indexed by Search Engine. So watch out.

Good – Opened to Search Engine

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Bad – Blocking Search Engine Request

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

3. Use Google’s webmaster tool to diagnose your sites health: Apply for the Google’s webmaster tools and monitor your website. It shows current status or errors occurred during indexing or crawling your website. So you can easily find out where the problem is.

This is very important and you should be aware if you are starting a new website for internet marketing otherwise your website won’t be getting any traffic from search engines.

Related posts:

1. Top 5 Wordpress Plug-in for Internet Marketing – Google XML Sitemaps
2. Redirection 301 and 302 and Google
3. Top 5 Wordpress Plug-in for Internet Marketing – All in One SEO Pack