The folks at google were kind enough to create an SEO starter guide. I think that it’s too good to ignore at this stage in my building. It’s a PDF that is free to download. Here is Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

The first plug-in I will install is the Google Sitemap Generator. This will alert google, yahoo, and someday MSN whenever I update my site.

To install this plug in I followed the simple steps outlined for me:

1. Download, extract, and upload the files via FTP to the plug in directory of my wordpress install.

2. Create and CHMOD to 666 the files sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz in my WordPress directory.

3. Open the plugin configuration page, which is located under Options -> XML-Sitemap and build the sitemap the first time.

BINGO done. Now everytime I update the search engines will send their spiders. I have waited until after installing this plug in to post so this should be the first update.

You can find this plug in here:

Google XML Sitemaps from wordpress.org

and the Authors [Arne Brachhold] homepage.