One of the invaluable benefits of blogging is that your posts can be quickly indexed by both blog search engines and the top search engines. Once I publish a new post, it appears very quickly on Google.
Within the settings section of your WordPress admin panel, there is a sub-section called "Writing." This is where you can list the blog search engines that you want to be notified every time you publish a new post. Here's a screen capture that shows the search engines that will be immediately notified every time I publish a post on the Dancing Interface:
These are the sites listed in the screen shot immediately above:
With WordPress blogs, however, it may be sufficient to just ping (notify) the first site on the list Ping-o-Matic. And Ping-o-Matic will, in turn, notify the other blog search engines. (I'm more familiar with Movable Type and I ping: Google, Technorati and Weblogs.com every time I publish a post).
4) Google Sitemaps
A Google Sitemap is an XML file that tells search engines (Google and other top search engines) which files on your website or blog to index and how often each file is updated.
Google Sitemaps do not necessarily improve how your website is ranked by top search engines. They simply notify top search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) about which pages to crawl on your site and when to do it. Sitemaps are especially useful for new websites/blogs, sites that are organized in a manner that makes it difficult for search engines to know what content to spider and for dynamically-generated content. Overall, my guess is that Sitemaps are helpful because they are telling search engines what and when to index your site. Plus, there's no downside to installing a Sitemap.
As you'll see in the following screen shot the options for customizing your Google Sitemaps are extensive. And I'm showing less than half of the available options. But other than configuring Yahoo notifications, I don't think I'd have to change too many parameters.
Click for Larger Image:
In Final Post About WordPress
In the third and final post for this series, I'll cover:
- Google Analytics: Tracking inbound and outbound links for your blog, and
- Adding links for social bookmarking and social networking sites in order to generate more traffic.
Machinima: Night Club Dancing in Second Life from CSI: NY
Machinima is the art of making movies within an online gaming environment or virtual world. For example, you could produce a dance performance within Second Life for the specific purpose of creating a dance video.
In October 2007, CSI: NY took place in Second Life where the crime scene happened to exist. But before the crime scene investigators could study the homicide, they first had to stop-off at an in-world night club to enjoy the dancing:
