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Add an HTML Sitemap to a WordPress Website

By on December 20, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Add an HTML Sitemap to a WordPress Website

Here’s some easy to follow instructions on how to add an HTML sitemap to a WordPress website.

After scouring the web and nearly giving myself a headache I found a solution, so this will hopefully save others those near headaches.

I’ll ramble here a little to begin with, to make getting to the crux of the problem easier, but you’re welcome to just leap to the formula below.

You see, when you find the site that provides the code for a WordPress HTML sitemap, it gives all the information, but not quite all the information on how to implement it – this was the frustrating part.

So I was armed with the ‘plugin’ code and the ‘shortcode’ to activate the sitemap, but didn’t really get the installation instructions of: “”Add the shortcode to the page(s) of your choice””. You see an HTML sitemap is a page alone, it shouldn’t be added to specific pages, it should usually be on a page called: sitmap.php/htm/html &c.

I wanted my sitemap to be linked from the footer of every page of the site.

So to start with you’ll need the ‘plugin’ code, which is courtesy of Angelo Mandato (credit at bottom of article); there’s 2 options: you can go to the installation page, where at the top right of the page there’s a big red button, or use the instructions below, which I’ve stated as being easier.

Being easier, I’d advise you to log-in to your WordPress Dashboard and click on ‘Plugins’ (left-hand menu), a little drop down menu reveals ‘Add New’ click here, on this page there’s a search box, type in ‘HTML Sitemap’ and click on ‘Search Plugins’. At the top of the list you’ll see: ‘HTML Page Sitemap’, version ‘1.1.1’ – click on install.

Okay, 1st of 3 jobs completed.

Now to create the interaction between the ‘plugin’ and the ‘shortcode’ which is [html-sitemap], you’ll firstly need to click on ‘Pages’ (in the left-hand menu) of your WordPress Dashboard, in the drop down menu you’ll need to click on ‘Add New’, this will create the new sitemap page. Where it asks for ‘title’ enter ‘Sitemap’, in the ‘content’ box you need to add your ‘shortcode’, which is [html-sitemap], make sure you use square brackets. Now because you don’t want this page in the main navigation, it is advisable to give it a parent, so in the ‘Page Attributes’ (right-hand menu), click on the ‘no parent’ drop down and put it under ‘Other Info’ or something similar, click on ‘publish page’.

Okay 2nd of 3 jobs done.

Now we need to get the sitemap visible on every page of the site. Back to the WordPress Dashboard, in the left-hand menu click on ‘Appearance’, the drop down menu offers the link ‘Editor’, click on this. In the right-hand menu of the new page all the ‘Templates’ are listed, go down till you find ‘Footer’ (footer.php), click on this and you’ll see the content of your site’s footer links. You will most likely have the following in the footer already: Powered by <>a href=””http://www.WordPress.org””>WordPress<>

Right after this add the following: | <>a href=””http://www.MYWEBSITE.com/sitemap”” target=””_blank>Sitemap<>

Naturally change the ‘MYWEBSITE’ to your own website and the.com to.de,.nl or.co.uk. Click on the blue button ‘Update File’.

That’s it job 3 of 3 completed.

Go to your website, press the ‘F5’ key, you may have to do this twice (that’s computers for you), and in your footer you should now see your newly created link to your site’s HTML sitemap, click on the link to test it, and you should find a nicely laid out sitemap indexing all your site’s pages.

Now naturally you may want the sitemap to be more detailed, for this I will reference you back to Angelo’s site, where he explains this further, but for me I just needed a nice clear HTML sitemap and no further headaches.

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On-Site SEO Optimization

By on August 18, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

On-Site SEO Optimization

Most bloggers love talking about the many off-site SEO optimization techniques you can use to get better SE rankings, but most neglect to also discuss on-site SEO optimization. If you don’t have a strong handle on your on-site SEO optimization of your blog then you will never see the full affect of your off-site marketing and promotion work. I actually work solely on the on-site SEO of my blog before I even begin starting my off-site SEO methods because without on-site SEO you won’t go very far. There are quite a few ways to make sure your blog is optimized for the search engines and that is exactly what we’re going to discuss in this article.

The first thing to do is make sure all of your meta tags are filled out properly and optimized correctly for your blog. The most important tag is the title tag which basically every search engine uses to gather information pertaining to your blog so make sure that this is filled out properly. You also need to make sure you write a custom description and add keywords to your blogs pages. There is a plug-in for WordPress which lets you make custom titles, keywords and description for each page on your blog and it’s something I couldn’t live without. You don’t need any knowledge of meta tags or HTML to be able to utilize the plug-in either which I find to be awesome.

After you’ve got all your meta tags and other important tags set-up you need to then create a sitemap for your blog. Now there is a plug-in that does this for you but you should also create your own HTML sitemap which is simply a new page on your blog with links to every page on the blog. This will allow the search engines to easily crawl your site and therefore index your pages a lot quicker then if you didn’t have a sitemap.

Once done setting up the sitemap you can begin looking at your content that is already on the blog. Make sure the content is optimized for the keywords that you’re targeting and also clean up any messy code that you notice. Messy code is bad for your search engine optimization and you should do the best you can to clean up all loose ends of coding so that you’re blog is optimized as well as it can be. Also make sure you add in keywords to previous posts for the new keywords that you’re targeting as it will help.

There is more you can do to make sure you have properly done your on-site SEO but there is always more that can be done. On-site SEO is a never ending task that takes time and effort out of your schedule every week, but without it your blog won’t do well at all. The more optimized you make your blog the more exposure you’ll receive from the search engines and if you’re receiving more exposure from the SE’s that directly turns into traffic and possible revenue.

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