I feel Wordpress is fast becoming the leader behind blogging software. This site itself is built on the Wordpress platform and performs well on a variety of areas that are important for me; Usability, Customisability, and Search engine friendliness. These are the three key areas to any web publishing application in my personal opinion. On the subject of search engine friendliness Google has a webmaster area that enables you to submit a sitemap, amongst other interesting tools. I’m not going to go in to why you should submit a sitemap and indeed have a Google account other than the fact Google say that Webmatser Tools “offer webmasters an easy way to make their sites more Google-friendly” and provides “Google’s view of your site, and diagnosing potential problems.”
So we have a great publishing platform and a great tool from Google to ensure they are aware of you new posts and overall content. However my ideal solution would be to combine these two elements together; I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. Arne Brachhold not only had the same idea earlier but also has built a terrific plug in. It works beautifully and I fully recommend it. Installation is very easy and the way it works is great.
Once you have registered and verified your site with Google and installed the plug-in with the correct write permissions you can continue blogging in the normal way. Each time you post the plug-in recreates the XML sitemap, adding your new post URL to the site map to. It then pings Google to inform them to collect the XML Sitemap.
It’s simple, pretty fast and a new version is in BETA so I look forward to seeing that.
