Internet directories are sites that list other websites into easily findable categories so that people who use them can quickly find what they are looking for. While search engines have overshadowed them to an extent in recent years, they are still a valuable tool for reaching potential customers.

By listing your store traffic site with internet directories:

You gain an additional backlinks to your site

This helps your site rank with search engines

You provide another place for people to find your site at

This helps you get more targeted traffic from non-search engine sources

Before you start submitting your site to directories

Since quality directories generally have sites which are submitted to them reviewed by people, I highly recommend that you only submit your site to them once it looks to be complete. This means that:

• Your site should not have broken links
• Your site should not have "Work in progress" or "Under construction" type notices on it

Once you have reviewed your site and made sure that it does not have broken links or notices state it is incomplete, start by submitting your site to at least a few good directories.

Initial Directory Submissions

When submitting to directories, it is entirely possible that they will decline to list your site. If that happens, don’t worry about it. Instead, simply note the directory on your to do list and submit it again in a few months once you have more content up.

To start with, I suggest listing your site on at least the following directories:

DMOZ.org

This is one of the main directories on the internet.

To submit to dmoz:

Go to DMOZ.org Add Site Information.

Read the instructions there and make note of the following:

• You shouldn’t have broken links on your site
• Don’t be promotional with your description. State the facts plainly without a bunch of keywords.

Browse DMOZ.org and find the category that best fits your site.

If in doubt, choose the one you think your site fits in best.

Use the "Submit ULR" link in that directory.

Enter your site with its full url (http://www.whatever.com/)

Finish submitting your site

Editors will review it by hand and let you know if it is accepted or not.

This could take quite some time, so don’t worry if you don’t hear back for a while.

WOWDirectory

This is another excellent directory.

To submit your site to WOWDirectory:

Wait until the weekend

Seriously. You cannot submit for a free listing except on weekends…

Go to The WOWDirectory Site Adding page

This might take some time to load as the instructions are via video.

Find the category your site belongs in

Go to WOWDirectory.

Browse to the category your store traffic site should be under.

Once in the proper category and subcategory, browse to the proper local area.

Submit your site

Select "Add URL"

Read the instructions

Fill in the form

Select "Submit" when done

Like the others, this can take some time to be processed.

Further directory submissions

Once you have submitted your site to the above directories, I recommend looking over The Vilesilencer Top 100 Directories Page and submitting your site to at least a few of the ones listed there as well.

Illumirate, Turnpike, and InfoListings would be a good start.

Finding other good directories

Besides Vilesilencer, another good way to locate directories that perform well is to do a search for your targeted keywords in Google or Yahoo and see if any directory entries come up in the first few pages.

If you like selling locally, searching for your keyword plus a local city or county name will often bring directories up on the first page. Look them over and submit your site to any which look promising.

On the internet, there are a number of sites that list feeds from all over, which people can search on to find content. These sites are called feed aggregator sites. By submitting your feed to them, your posts will be found by people searching those sites for information and products.

The Benefits of Submitting Your Store Traffic Site

By taking the time to submit your store traffic site to feed readers, you do the following:

• Get automatic backlinks to your new articles and product showcases
• Let people who prefer feed aggregators to search engines find you site, products, and services

When you start article marketing, this will help to more quickly get people viewing your articles.

Getting your sites feed URL

To submit your RSS feed to aggregator sites, you will first need to get the URL to your rss feed.

Getting Your RSS Feed URL

By default, your feed should be found at /feed on your site.

e.g. http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/feed for this site

If you cannot find your feed URL:

Locate the RSS logo on your site (most themes have one)

This is normally an orange image with a radio like graphic

Select the RSS logo

This will take you to the RSS URL and display your feed

Copy the URL from your browser

Initial Feed Aggregator Submissions

I recommend submitting your RSS feed to the following feed aggregator sites as they are highly used, free, and simple to get setup with:

FeedRaider

Setup an account

1. Go to Feedraider.com
2. Select "Sign Up" at the top right
3. Fill out the provided form and submit it

Create a Feed Page

1. Select Create
2. Enter a Title (I recommend using domain keywords)
3. Select your layout and privacy settings

When finished, you will be taken to your new feed page

Add your websites RSS Feed

Select "Edit"

Select "Add new feeds"

Enter your feed URL into the provided box

Select "Update" at the bottom of the page

Confirm your Feedraider account

You should receive an email after you create your feedraider account.

Select the verification link within it to confirm your account.

Fail to do this and your account will be deleted automatically after a while.

Yahoo Feeds

To setup a yahoo feed account, you will need to create a Yahoo account.

Visit the Yahoo Feed Page

Create a Yahoo account ( or log into yours )

Select "Sign Up" or "Sign In" under "Get Started" to login or sign up.

Fill out the signup form if you are creating an account.

When finished, select "Continue" to return to the Yahoo Feed Page.

Submit your site feed

1. Select "Get Started"
2. Scroll down to the Feed URL box and enter your feed URL into it
3. Select "Add"

When finished, you will be taken to your yahoo page and see your feed at the top.

Your feed is now available via yahoo feeds.

Feed Fury

Go to the FeedFury Website

(optional) Create a FeedFury account

Submit your feed

• Select "Submit Feed" from the left Navigate menu
• Enter your feed URL
• Fill in the Captcha
• Select "Submit Feed"

You should see the page reload with the phrase “Success: Feed added to site” at the top

Further Feed Aggregators

If you want, you can search for other feed aggregators to submit your site to, but the above should be good enough initially to help people find your site and build backlinks to your articles automatically.

Some of the things I like best about Plumdrop:

• You can list all of your online selling venues on it
• It provides a blog with dofollow links
• You can give people extra information about you, your enterprise, and the things you sell
• You can join a variety of groups and meet like-minded sellers

For the purposes of driving traffic to your store traffic site, Plumdrop gives you an extra platform to notify people about the various things you sell…while allowing you to create backlinks to your own site however you want.

Creating a Plumdrop account

Go to Plumdrop.com

Select "Sign up in under 5 minutes"

This will take you to the signup page

Fill out the signup form:

• Your email address
• verify your email
• A password
• Verify your password
• A nickname (to display publicly
• Your zip code (to find people locally)
• Business title (the name of your enterprise)
• Descrption (yeah, it’s spelled wrong)
• Business Tags
• The best category for what you offer
• A photo ( if you want, can change it later )
• Agree to the terms of service
• Choose to signup to the newsletter or not

Select "Complete Signup"

Confirm your account creation

Once you have your account created, I’d recommend taking a look around and then doing some initial profile setup.

Plumdrop Profile Setup

When logged in, select "My Account" to see a variety of available options. The below are those I recommend filling in to start with:

"My Profile"

You filled this in when you created your account.

Used to update your store title, store description, store tags, main store category, and profile picture.

"My Groups"

I recommend joining groups for both your selling venue and the types of products you sell

You can leave posts in groups

"My Deals"

If you setup any coupons for your store, you can use My Deals to add coupons for fellow Plumdrop users

"My Venues"

Add your online stores here with names, titles, and urls.

Adding a blog entry to your Plumdrop Page

Once you have things setup, I recommend creating at least one blog entry with information about your store traffic site and/or online store.

Log into Plumdrop, if you are not logged in

Select "My Plumdrop Page"

This will display your plumdrop page

Select "View Blog" from the right menu

This will display your Plumdrop blog

Select "Post new blog entry" from the left side

This will open the blog entry creation page

Create your blog entry

This is like creating a new post in wordpress.

Enter a title for your blog entry

Enter the contents of your post (in design or html view).

I recommend an introduction, a link to your store traffic site, and a link to your online store for your first post.

Be sure to create good backlinks! Use keywords as links!

Note whether or not you want to allow comments

Select "Post New Blog Entry!"

Your entry will be posted.

You now have another quality backlink using your search keywords

Putting Plumdrop to Use

Going forward, I recommend at least creating occasional posts to your Plumdrop blog, especially when you create new product showcases, new category showcases, or new special offers.

Remember to avoid circular links and to create quality backlinks!

My Plumdrop Page

You can find me on Plumdrop under LibertyUnchained.

For the purposes of increasing your search traffic and getting more people to your store, it has the following going for it:

• You can place links to whatever you want in your tweets
• Those who want to see what you are doing will see them
• Twitter has a pagerank of 9, which is about as good as it gets

Most of the excellent internet marketers I know who use twitter note that they get the best results when they mix both business and personal information. For example, instead of just listing products, sales, etc., they also give bits and pieces of information detailing what they are up to or interesting things they have seen.

Creating a Twitter Account

Go to the Twitter signup page

Fill in the form provided

Full Name

Username

Password

Email

Whether or not you want email updates

The Captcha

Select "Create my account"

This will take you to a page where you can search for existing friends on other services

I tend to skip this step

Select "Skip this step"

Or see if you have friends on Yahoo, AOL, or Gmail

Uncheck any of the default people to follow who you don’t want to follow

I just uncheck the select all box and uncheck all of them

Select "Finish" or "Skip this step"

Your twitter account is now created!

Setting up your Twitter Account

Once your twitter account is setup, you can start using Twitter right away and/or setup your profile and options.

On your profile page, you can add a photo by selecting the "Add a photo" box near the top right.

On your settings page, there are various tabs with different information. Some of the more important ones are listed below. Be sure to select Save on each page to save any changes.

"Account" → "More Info URL"

This should be a link to your store traffic site (or online store)

"Account" → "One Line Bio"

About your or your store, in 160 characters or less

"Design"

You can customize the look of your twitter page here.

Using your Twitter Account

Now that you have your account setup, a picture, a link to your website, and a short blurb about your site setup, it is time to start making use of twitter.

Your first "Tweet"

To start with, I’d place up a simple tweet linking your site.

Select "Home" from the twitter nav bar while you are logged in

Enter a link to your site in the "What are you doing?" box

I recommend a description in there too…at least as much of one as you can fit in 120 characters.

If you want, you might consider using one of the widgets or plugins made for twitter. A few can be found at The WordPress page on the Twitter Fan Wiki.

Going forward, you should consider creating "Tweets" for articles you write while doing article marketing, specials you are having, interesting new products you are offering, free resources you put up, contests, and even random thoughts you find interesting.

My Twitter Page

My twitter account for this site is privateerweb, so fell free to follow me by visiting http://twitter.com/privateerweb if you want updates on various things as I do them.

Gaining followers

One good way to get twitter followers is to start following people. Use the search functionality on the right, look over the results, and follow whomever you want. With this account, I will be following Bonanzle sellers *grin* and people talking about internet marketing.

If you have a page with a lot of outbound links, you will have a much harder time ranking that page than if you would if you had fewer outbound links.

To avoid what is commonly called "bleeding pagerank", I recommend including the following attribute in links to other sites unless you specifically want to help them build pagerank:

• <a href="URL" rel="nofollow">Link-Name</a>

Additionally, you might want to also consider having links to external sites open in a new window so that your site will still be displayed once a visitor closes the external site. To do so, include the target attribute as follows:

• <a href="URL" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Link-Name</a>

By using both together, you avoid passing your pagerank on and ensure that visitors who follow external links have a better chance of comingback to your site.

The quality of a link from another site depends upon several factors:

The page rank of the site which links to you

Page rank is an artificial rank provided by search engines to decide how much authority a particular site has.

Page rank starts at 0 and goes up as high as 10, with each rank being many times better than the previous rank.

A single link from a page rank 8 site can be worth thousands of times as much as a link from a page rank 0 site.

The wording of the link which points to your site

Getting a link via your sites primary targeted keywords is worth a lot more than getting a link via your store name…unless you are really working for brand recognition.

If a search engine sees a link to your site with the words "excellent antique books", then it will give you some rank for those words in searches.

If, however, the link uses the words "Tims Magical Stuff", then search engines will give you some rank for "Tims Magical Stuff". This is still good, but not nearly as good as "excellent antique books" if antique books is one of your sites targeted keywords.

The type of site linking to your site

If you get a link from a high page rank site of good reputation, then your sites authority can get a good boost.

If, however, you get a link from a blacklisted site, your sites authority might actually drop a bit. Typically, however, this isn’t too bad unless you have almost all of your links from sites of ill repute and none from authority sites.

Whether the link has nofollow set or not

Links back to your site which have rel="nofollow" in them do not seem to help your page rank, though they do provide a place for more people to find your site from, which is almost always a good thing.

Now that you know what a good link is composed of, you know how to create the best links to your own site when you have the option to choose the links words. This is one of the reasons that I recommend keeping a keyword log for your site handy. If you can get ten good links pointing to your domain which use your targeted keywords, chances are good that your site will soon start showing up on the first page of major search engines for those keywords…provided that there isn’t too much competition for them.

To see a sites page rank in Google, get the Google Toolbar for Mozilla.

And yes, there is a lot more that could be said on backlinks, but the above should be good enough to get started with ranking your site.

Types of potential paying customers

Typically, online store sites spend a lot of time selling individual products or services, but fail to put up content that will naturally bring targeted traffic to their site.

When potential buyers go looking for something, they tend to fall into a couple of categories:

People who want to buy something and know what it is

These people will find what you offer via search engines with product keywords

• They will search on product names
• Some will include "$" in their search as they want pages which actually sell items

• Some will include words like "Buy", "For Sale" etc.

They are also the people who have the most competition for their money.

People who want to buy a specific type of thing, but have not decided upon a particular product.

These people will find what you offer via search engines with category keywords

• They will search on general types of products
• Some will include words like "best", "good", etc.

There is generally decent competition for these peoples money.

People who want a solution to a problem, but don’t know what the solution is

These people will use search engines to hunt for solutions to some kind of perceived problem.

• They will search on problem words rather than product or category related words.
• If you can provide a solution to their problem, then you can sell to them.
• The words they search on may appear to have nothing to do with what you sell.

Competition for these customers varies greatly, but if you take the time to do keyword research and locate these customers, you can make a lot of sales fast…provided you sell something that will solve their perceived problem.

There are certainly other types of potential customers out there, but the above are all perfectly reachable and willing to buy if you can lead them to your products.

Content creation for potential paying customers

With the above three types of people in mind, here is how I recommend adding content to your store traffic site:

People who know what they want

These are the people that I would build product showcase pages for.

Since they already know what they want, they may buy from you without a second thought if you can show them what they want.

However, some will be looking for:

• Specific details about the product such as color, size, brand, etc.
• Specific details about your service such as shipping information, return policies, etc.
• Any special reasons to buy from you rather than someone else

A clean, simple page with a good picture, clear information on the features and/or attributes of the product you are offering, and links to your selling policies will usually be more than enough to make a sale to these customers.

If they are bargain hunting or comparison shopping, they might also be interested in knowing about anything extra they get should they buy from you. Some easy to create extras which cost little or no money are:

E-books / pdfs containing information such as

Clear, concise instructions on assembly or usage

Extra uses for the product in question

How to care for and/or clean the product

How to customize the product

Storage cases

Low cost, closely related products

Coupons for services related to the product

These can be from other places

People who know what kind of thing they want

These are people I would build category and/or product showcase pages for.

Since they know generally what they want, they are often looking for:

• Recommendations on good products of the type they seek
• Information about how different related products compare to each other

To increase sales in this group, you might consider the following:

Providing detailed articles on the benefits of particular products

These I would place on product showcase pages either as part of the description or as links

Providing articles comparing closely related products

These should weigh the pros and cons in comparison to each other

I would place such articles as links in category showcase pages and perhaps note which you believe to be the strongest product for particular uses on the category showcase page itself.

Providing testimonials from people who have bought particular products and recommend them

These can be testimonials on other sites or direct testimonials from your own customers.

If you use testimonials from other sites, I recommend using a small snippet of the testimonial along with the provided name and site name that you found the testimonial on…but the site name does not need to be a link. If you do provide a link, I recommend having it open in a new window and making it into a nofollow link.

People who are looking for solutions to a problem

Doing this can work very well, but requires more than simply targeting obvious keywords and using them to bring in potential customers.

To find these people, I recommend looking over the products you offer and trying to think of how your products could take care of a perceived problem or need.

Sites such as ask.com, yahoo answers, and let you see what kinds of perceived problems people are trying to get addressed. Looking them over, if you can match one of your products to the solution for a problem, you have a good candidate for an article.

Tying it all together

You can create posts on your site and link them to and from your category and product showcases.

Additionally, you could write articles on other sites and/or create digital products based off of them to sell directly on your site.

For now, I recommend doing the following:

Update any product showcases with specific information about the product.

You can do this in this in your product description or via the sideboxes.

Check out "Creating boxed areas with html" for information on possible ways to cleanly show attributes of your products.

Check out "Creating custom sideboxes for product showcases" for information on ways to create sideboxes.

Update or create a shipping information and return policy and link them from your product showcases.

Check out "How to create a shipping information page" if needed.

Make note of other reasons to buy from you rather than someplace else

You might add a link to your store feedback if the store you sell on has such.

You might make note of any special discounts such as a percent off if they buy over a certain amount of goods from you.

You might create information products for certain products or product categories and note that they are free with any purchase.

Don’t get carried away. For now, I’d hold off on creating too many articles on your site because we will discuss article marketing before long. However, a couple of comparison or informative articles to give visitors more information about what you offer couldn’t hurt.

To do so:

Create a new plain text document

• Windows Instructions

Select your Start Button

This is normally at the bottom left of your screen.

Select "Run.."

Type in notepad

Select OK

Copy the following code into your new text document:

1. Click in the box below
2. Select "Edit" → "Select All" from your browsers file menu
3. Select "Edit" → "Copy" from your browsers file menu
4. Select your empty text document
5. Click in the body of the text document
6. Select "Edit" → "Paste" from your editors file menu

<table class="pws-sing-left-item">
<tr><th>HEADLINE</th></tr>
<tr><td><hr /></td></tr>
<tr><td>
BODY
</td></tr>
</table>

Change HEADLINE to whatever you want for a headline

Or delete that line and the following line if you want no headline

Change BODY to whatever you want to place in the body of the box

This could be text in paragraph tags, a bulleted list, a numbered list, an image, some combination of such, or anything else that you could put into a web page…including php code.

Paragraphs

These should be contained in <p> and </p> tags.

Bulleted lists

These should not be in p tags

These look like:
<ul>
<li>item one</li>
</ul>

Numbered lists

These should not be in p tags

These look like:
<ol>
<li>item one</li>
</ol>

Images

These should be in paragraph tags

These look like:
<a href="URL" title="TITLE">LINKNAME</a>

Save the changes to your new text document

1. Select "Edit" → "Save As" from the editors file menu
2. Make sure it is somewhere you can find it at
3. Change "Save as type:" to "All files"
4. Give it a name ending with .php ( like ps-leftbox-25percentdiscount.php )

Upload the file to the directory of your current theme on your web server

• Atahualpa Theme Users:

Upload your new file to /public_html/wp-content/themes/atahualpa/

Set one of the sideboxes for a product showcase to use your new file

Edit one of your product showcase pages

Set a sidebox to use your new document as its source via metadata entries

Setting the first sidebox to use it:

Metadata Name: pws-Left-Box-One Value: ps-leftbox-25percentdiscount.php

Setting the second sidebox to use it:

Metadata Name: pws-Left-Box-Two Value: ps-leftbox-25percentdiscount.php

Setting the third sidebox to use it

Metadata Name: pws-Left-Box-Three value: ps-leftbox-25percentdiscount.php

Of course, instead of ps-leftbox-25percentdiscount.php, use the name you gave your file.

Save your changes and view the results

If you need to make changes you can use the built in wordpress editor or edit your file and re-upload it.

]]> http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/articles/creating-custom-sideboxes-for-product-showcases.html/feed 0 http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/articles/how-to-create-boxes-on-your-web-pages-with-html-and-css.html http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/articles/how-to-create-boxes-on-your-web-pages-with-html-and-css.html#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:51:33 +0000 Privateer Web Solutions http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/?p=588 If you want to create a boxed area within a web page, there are a good number of ways to go about doing so. As this site deals with promoting online stores and increasing traffic to them, this article will cover a few box types that are useful for displaying product details in a clean manner.

The informational blurb box

Sometimes you might want a single piece of information to really stand out on a page so that people are sure to see it.

One way to do this is by adding styles to a paragraph, which looks like the following:

Don’t miss this special offer!

The code for the above box is as follows:

<p style="border: 1px solid #000000; background-color: #CCCCCC; font-weight: bold; color: #CE0000;">Don't miss this special offer!</p>

If you want to be able to use style sheets, you could simply make a new style for such boxes like the following:

.callout {
 border: 1px solid #000000;
 background-color: #CCCCCC;
 font-weight: bold;
 color: #CE0000;
}

You could then create the same box with:

• <p class="callout">Don’t miss this special offer!</p>

Atahualpa users could place the callout css in theme options under CSS Inserts via "Appearance" → "Atahualpa Theme Options" → "HTML/CSS Inserts" → "CSS Inserts"

Other themes would generally ahve this placed within the style.css file for the theme.

Another way to do this is by adding styles to a table, which looks like the following:

Don’t miss this special offer!

The code for the above box is as follows:

<table style="border: 1px solid #000000; background-color: #CCCCCC; font-weight: bold; color: #CE0000;">
<tr><td>Don't miss this special offer!</td></tr>
</table>

Of course, you could use a style to make entering this by hand easier:

.callout {
 border: 1px solid #000000;
 background-color: #CCCCCC;
 font-weight: bold;
 color: #CE0000;
}

That would change the table declaration to:

• <table class="callout">

If you wanted links inside, they would need styled as well.

To place the style inline, you would use:

• <a href="URL" style="color: #CE0000; font-weight: bold;">

To place the style in cascading style sheets, you might use the following code:

.callout a {
 font-weight: bold;
 color: #CE0000;
}
.callout a:hover {
 color: #000000;
 background-color: #CE0000;
}

That would cause the link to look like the rest, but make the background turn red and the font turn black when you place your mouse over it.

Here is a little more information on the attributes used above:

Borders

border: 1px solid #000000;

1px

Sets the width of the border as a whole in pixels

2px would make a two pixel border

solid

Tells the browser to draw a solid border

Alternatives are dotted and dashed

#000000

Tells the browser to draw a black border

The notation is #RRGGBB (red/green/blue)

Background:

background-color: #CCCCCC;

CCCCCC is the red/green/blue value to color the border with

Font weight:

font-weight: bold;

Various values available. The most common being bold or normal

Font color

color: #CE0000;

The color to use for text. In this case a shade of red.

Text decoration

text-decoration: underline;

Special decorations for text such as underline, strikethrough, and none.

There are certainly other attributes which can be tweaked, but that should give you some ideas.

The product attributes box

If you want a box to quickly show certain attributes of a product, I recommend using a table like one of the following:

Size	Weight	Price
Large	2 lbs.	$4.00

<table width="50%" style="align: center; 1px solid #000000;">
<tr>
 <th>Size</th>
 <th>Weight</th>
 <th>Price</th>
</tr>
<tr>
 <td>Large</td>
 <td>2 lbs.</td>
 <td>$4.00</td>
</tr>
</table>

or

Six Things!

Thing one Thing two Thing three

Thing four Thing five Thing six

<table width="99%" style="border: 1px solid #000000;">
<caption>Six Things!</caption>
<tr>
<td>
 <ul>
  <li>Thing one</li>
  <li>Thing two</li>
  <li>Thing three</li>
 </ul>
</td>
<td>
 <ul>
  <li>Thing four</li>
  <li>Thing five</li>
  <li>Thing six</li>
 </ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

As with the boxes at the top, these tables can have their styles set as well.

Special info on tables:

It is worth noting that in tables, you can specify width to set how large the table will be.

This can be either a flat width in pixels or a percentage of the width available to the table.

You can also set widths on td elements. For example, if you had three columns and wanted all of them to be about the same width, you could set width="33%" in the first two td pieces which would force the third to use the other 34%.

]]> http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/articles/how-to-create-boxes-on-your-web-pages-with-html-and-css.html/feed 0 http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/articles/how-to-create-a-xml-site-map-for-your-store-traffic-site.html http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/articles/how-to-create-a-xml-site-map-for-your-store-traffic-site.html#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:30:04 +0000 Privateer Web Solutions http://www.privateerwebsolutions.com/?p=546 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.

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