Once you are ready to have your wordpress site indexed by Ask.com, Google.com, MSN.com, and Yahoo.com, you should create an xml sitemap and submit it to them.
For wordpress, I recommend grabbing the Simple Google Sitemap plugin to do this for you.
If you need help getting it installed, see setting up new plugins in wordpress.
Creating and Submitting Your XML Sitemap
- Upload an empty sitemap.xml file to your wordpress root directory
- To create an empty sitemap.xml, I recommend creating it on your server directly as follows:
- Log into cpanel for your server
- Open the “File Manager”
- It is located in the “Files” section on the right side
- Browse to /public_html/ on the left side
- Select “New File”
- It looks like a piece of paper with a green + on it and is at the far left of the top menu
- A window should come up to create a new file
- Enter sitemap.xml into the File Name box
- Select “Create new file”
- You should now see a sitemap.xml file in the /public_html/ folder
- This should be /public_html/ if you set wordpress up as your site.
- If you have an empty sitemap.xml file on your computer and want to upload it instead, you can do this with cpanel or ftp
- Change the file permission to be writable
- In cpanel, edit the permissions to 666 (RW-RW-RW-)
- Log into cpanel
- Select the File Manager
- Go to your site root
- Select "/public_html/ or Web Root on the left menu
- Click the box next to your sitemap.xml file
- Select "File Permissions" from the top menu
- Change the file permissions to read+write for everyone
- 666 (numeric) or rw-rw-rw-
- Save the attributes
- Active Simple Google Sitemap in WordPress
- Select "Plugins" from the admin menu
- Find Simple Google Sitemap and select activate
- Create Your Sitemap
- Select "Settings" → "Simple Sitemap"
- Select "Save Options"
- Publish your Sitemap
- Select "Create Sitemap"
If you get a notice that any of them failed, just click the link and it should work.
Thats it. Your site should now be indexed rather quickly by ask.com, google.com, msn.com, and yahoo.com.
Note: It appears that something has been changed and the Simple Google Sitemap plugin no longer works properly with yahoo.com. If yahoo gives you errors, don’t worry about it.