Submit sitemaps for blogger,wordpress for better indexing

For a better SEO, in the last post is explained how to use the image ALT tags.

One such technique is to submit a sitemap of your website or a blog.Basically a sitemap represents the architechture of your site.It is simply a webpage that lists the pages of a site in a hierarchical fashion.

The google version of explaining a sitemap is ‘a sitemap is a page which helps the users to easily access all the pages of your website.’

But do users really bother about sitemap when they visit a webpage? Do they search for sitemap first when they visit a webpage.If they realy do then why is the sitemap placed somewhere in the bottom of a page with light colors?

Webmasters basically submit a sitemap for better indexing of their site in organic searches.

Sitemaps can improve search engine optimization  of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found within a single page.

Now the process of submitting a  sitemap of a blog ,be it a blogger blog or wordpress or anything is our matter of concern.

To do that first you need a google webmaster account.After logging into your webmasters tools account,you need to submit your site.Do this by typing your site URL in your dashboard.Then click add site.

The feeds of your blogger blog can be submitted as your sitemap i.e., xyz.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

To do that click the sitemaps link present on the left site and choose ‘add a general web sitemap’(Now i think webmasters page was changed by google but you can still submit you sitemap in the sameway).

Now just add feeds/posts/default to your blog name which is present there.

You can also add feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated.

Thats it.Submit your sitemap.Generally  a sitemap will be accessed every 24hrs,so logon to your webmasters account the next day.

You may be surprised to see lot of errors in red color.This is because you have registered your site in blogspot as some xyz[dot]blogspot[dot]com and not as www[dot]xyz[dot]blogspot[dot]com.

To make this change,go to setting link in your webmaster tools account and change the preferred domain to www[dot]xyz.blogspot.com (for both xyz[dot]blogspot[dot]com and www[dot]xyz[blogspot[doy]com.

It’ll take some time to set your preferred domain to the domian you mentioned.

After it has been set you’ll see no errors with you sitemaps.

And dont worry if all your submitted URL’s are not indexed.It’s common and happens to everyone.

If you use a wordpress blog follow the steps mentioned above but while submitting your sitemap you just only have to type ‘feed’ (without quotation).This may sometimes give errors so also submit another sitemap by typing ‘?feed=atom’ (again without quotations).

The first sitemap is an RSS sitemap so will have some problem in general with blogs but the second one is a regular atom sitemap which is ok with blogs.

If you’re looking for sitemaps for blogs using wordpress.org machine we’ve got that too.

But are sitemaps really needed for blogs?