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

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

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.

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

Let’s see what the difference is first.

301 :  Moved Permanently. 301 tells you that the current website requested by current URI is moved to a new brand new URI, so you should drop the originally used URI. If you are moving a website to a different domain, this is the way should be done.

302 : Moved Temporarily. 302 tells you that the current redirection is temporary  and you should use the original request URI next time you visit again. If you are temporarily redirecting to a page (site update or special product promotion…), this is it.

Now let’s see How Google sees these redirection codes. If 301 is used, Google will move original request URI’s PageRank to the new destination URI. And eventually remove the request URI. If 302 is used PageRank will be intact to the original website and the original website will also benefit from the destination website’s content.

Many shared webhosting accounts set up both www (ex. http://www.example.com )and top level domain (http://example.com) to point to the same webpage by default. If you use them both website URLs thinking they are the same address, you are mistaken. In fact, you will eventually split the PageRank and pages might be considered as duplicated content.

I had this WordPress website to promote. Let’s say it’s http://www.example.com. I found that when I checked the Search engine status and searched the domain, I domain name was ‘example.com’ instead of ‘www.example.com’.  I just couldn’t understand because I was promoting only using ‘www.example.com’ everywhere , but ‘example.com’ was cached by Google.

But then I remembered that I used ‘example.com’  during the first website development. I setup Google analytic code in the website, and used ‘example.com’ most of the times accessing the website. I think that made the ‘example.com’ as the primary or first URL to Google instead ‘www.example.com’

So I checked the HTTP header (This can be easily done by run curl or wget tool ) and when I used ‘example.com’ , the server replied with 302 code! So that’s why ‘example.com’ still lived in the Google Search Engine.

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:30:32 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8i
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0,pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=c22b7be08ec5f5ee5c9238727b3eec3a; path=/
Location: http://www.example.com/
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

I quickly checked the WordPress PHP files and wp_redirect function’s default redirect code was 302. Solution was to enforce 301 redirection and I found this Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin. In fact there are other redirection plugins out there , but this plugin is simple and easy to setup. Just enabled the ‘Hostname Redirect’ check box from the option page and it’s showing 301. Thanks Scott.

I hope this update will resolve the issue with Google search result. When you are thinking of permanent website redirection, make sure you use “301”.

Here are some more reading on 301 and 302 redirections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection
http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2008/01/redirects-permanent-301-vs-temporary.php
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/

Here is an update. From Google Webmaster – Duplicate content and multiple site issues, there was a new introduction of link tag with ‘rel’ attribute that will help to correct and guide Google to move the destination website. Add below tag in the header in between <head> and </head>

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com"/>