Oct 02
Boost Blog Traffic and Reach and Improve Your Sitemaps
Most avid wordpress users will probably be aware of the following three plugins, but did you know they can all work together?
The plugins I’m looking at are:
Google XML sitemaps is a great plugin for creating XML sitemaps of your blog content for Google, Yahoo, MSN Ask and anyone else that access these files.
The translator plugin will use one of 4 services to auto translate your blog into many different languages and provide these links to the sitemap generator.
These two are great for expanding your content and audience while letting the search engines know about your additional internationalised content on their own, but the popularity contest plugin also helps a great deal.
Google XML sitemaps ask that a priority is set for the indexing of each page, so it knows how important this page is on your site. The site map generator plugin deals with this by using either a predefined set of priorities set by you or metrics based on comment counts, etc.
This isn’t great because default priority settings will not reflect your blog that accurately and comment based priority settings may not either as your content may not necessarily be suitable for comments, which is where popularity comes in.
The popularity contest plugin records the popularity of each post based on hits, and the sitemap generator can use these metrics to autocalculate sitemap priority for you, meaning that the priorities reflect much more what’s being looked at on your blog as opposed to what’s being commented on – good for you good for the search engines.
So there you have it – you can boost the quanity and reach of content on your blog just by translating it and you can improve the quality of sitemaps using popularity contest – nice.
