I’ve been doing research lately on increasing traffic and search engine results to my various websites. One thing I ran across from Google is called Sitemaps.
From Google’s website “Google Sitemaps is an easy (and free) way to submit all your URLs to Google and help improve their visibility in our search results.” Sounds good, so I started trying to figure out how to make a sitemap. Well, it turns out that the site maps are a form of XML and Google’s instructions talk about downloading some files and running some scripts from Python (which I have no clue about and wouldn’t know where to start.) I use WordPress for my blog and a couple of other sites I manage and I use Pixelpost for my Photoblog. So after some more looking I found that there are some plug-ins for WordPress and addons for Pixelpost.
The WordPress Plugin was created by Arne Brachhold and is located here.
I found the Pixelpost addon here.
I have no idea if doing this will really help with Google visibility, but it was fairly easy to implement and doesn’t require ongoing maintenance. We’ll see I guess.
Update: (05/13/2006) I ran across a plug-in for WordPress concerning meta tags. From what I understand most search engines ignore these tags, but there are some out there that pickup on meta tags. The plugin can be found here at Project Arcanum. As with the Google sitemaps, I’m not sure if adding meta tags will make any difference.