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Check Your Google Webmaster Tools Often

By Dave Smith Monday April 21, 2008

Flat Tire Halts Whole Car We get busy. It happens. I know because it happens to me. I have a routine I usually go through at the start and the end of the day. It varies little, making sure everything is up and running for the hours I’m shut down.

Sometimes though a piece of that routine gets clipped. Maybe it isn’t checking the hittail search results for a few days. Sometimes it isn’t logging into the Google Webmaster Tools and that is the one I want to encourage you to check daily.

I use a Google sitemap generator plugin which generates a new sitemap with every new post and pings Google. I still manually submit it most of the time, but not always. It had been several days since I had checked the Webmaster Tools and I was surprised when I logged in to find the Lab’s sitemap had ERRORS!.

I had just published a post which would generate a new sitemap so I hand submitted it. A few minutes later it came back with ERRORS and a strong suggestion to verify the sitemap before submitting it again.

I loaded the sitemap file into a browser and it showed errors as well. Rather than try and spend time finding them, which I would if I had too, I went to the plugin option page and hand generated a sitemap. This one validated and I submitted it. In a few minutes it returned a status of OK.

But what if I hadn’t checked. What if my sitemap was sitting out there for weeks or a month and had errors in it. Probably a glitch during the read write. But whatever the cause it isn’t a good thing to overlook.

Sometimes it is the nail in the tire that brings the whole car to a halt.

This is the Monday morning reminder. Put this on your list “Check Google Webmaster Tools” and don’t forget routine maintenance is as important as increasing performance.

Sitemap Plugin

By Dave Smith Friday January 5, 2007

I wanted a sitemap on our Tucson Real Estate blog. I went looking on the WordPress plugin section site. I found Dagon Design sitemap plugin easy to install and configure and it does exactly what I wanted it to do. You can see it at work on the Sitemap page in the right navigation.

Here are the simple steps to putting a sitemap on your WordPress blog.

Installation

Download dd-sitemap-gen.txt and rename it to dd-sitemap-gen.php
Upload the file to the plugins folder of your WordPress installation
Activate the plugin in your Plugins administration panel
Configure the plugin in the Options panel (under DDSitemapGen)
Create a New Page, Title: Sitemap, place the code below on the page using the HTML* window and save:

code snippit

*Note: For Wordpress 2.0 users who are using the new rich-text editor – be sure to click the ‘html’ button to edit the page source directly. Otherwise Wordpress will wrap code tags around the line which generates the sitemap and it will not work.

You can actually put that code anywhere and it will generate the sitemap, but if you want to keep it simple and not have to add this code whenever you change a theme this is the way I suggest you do it.

I would also suggest you set the options for pages to 0 so it will display on a single page. There are some SEO reasons for this.

I also turned off the option to display a post only in the first category. I want people to be able to find a post in any of the categories associated with that post.

You will notice you can’t swipe and copy the code above. It is a graphic since I don’t know how to display PHP code in a post.

Any help out there on code display in a post would be greatly appreciated.