After successfully importing my blog from new Blogger to WordPress, I noticed that my new theme, Cutline, had the option to create a page called “Sitemap”. Wonderful! I immediately set this up  and created a page to help readers navigate my site NeenMachine.com.

I also use Google Webmaster Tools. This is a bundle of tools that help you analyze internal and external links to your site and it gives some insight into that mysterious Google term - PageRank. To learn more about it read Google Webmaster Tools Explained.

It is here, using Google Webmaster Tools that Google allows you to submit a sitemap. Presumably this will make it easier for Google’s bots to crawl and index your site. So, being the WordPress newbie that I am, I promptly submitted the sitemap from my website.

About an hour later I checked back on my Google Webmaster Tool account and, you guessed it, I had an ERROR. Upon further research I discovered this wonderful article by Courtney Tuttle entitled Getting Your XML Sitemap into Google.  This article explains, in basic terms, how to generate and submit a sitemap to Google - in the format that Google requires - XML.

Apparently, the reader friendly sitemap that I originally submitted to Google was not in the correct format. Luckily, there is a plugin that will generate the sitemap for you called Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress. I was able to easily install this to my plugins folder and following Court’s detailed instructions, generate an XML sitemap which, this time, Google accepted.