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The Importance of That XML Sitemap | TwentyEleven Web Design
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The Importance of That XML Sitemap

Aaargh…..What can I say.  As every small business owner knows (especially in web design), getting exposure is the most important thing.  And in my case one main focus is my Search Engine Ranking (SERPS).  Since I started my business this has slowly been getting better i.e. going from non existence to placing on page 2 on Google in a very short space of time. Not bad considering that the search term Web Design Stratford upon Avon is a fiercely competitive one.

Not so long back I made a post about the release of WordPress 3. Now as fantastic as this is to the web design community I didn’t realise that it would have such and immediate and negative impact on my SERP. Why? I hear you ask.  Well one of the plugins that I implement on pretty much every single Wordpess site I do has to be the Google XML Sitemap plugin by Arnee. It is without doubt the easiest most manageable sitemap plugin there is.

I run multiple subdomains on my site and as WordPress & WordPress MU had been brought together under the WordPress 3 package I knew that this was the way forward to seamlessly manage my domains from my admin panel.  Unfortunately the Google XML Sitemap plugikn was not compatible with WordPress 3………….aaargh.

Because of this I had to go through a few weeks with no sitemap plugin installed (basically waiting for the update to come out).  As a result of this my ranking dropped dramatically from gently rising up the order on page 2, to sitting there on page 5…not good. Thankfully a release has now been made public.

So now I have to wait for my site to be indexed again to see whats happening.

On another note if anyone is interested in a brilliant search engine optimisation guide for WordPress I think that you can look no further than the guide over at Yoast. That, coupled with a few other tweaks by using Yslow and slowly building backlinks has helped mygain exposure on search engines…….even though there is still a long way to go.

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