Last Monday, I was reading an SEOmoz article, and decided to ask FHK’s IT Guy, Ron, if we should have one of those. Mind you, I had no idea what I was talking about, but after reading information like this, this and this, it sounded like something we should try. Basically, a sitemap is an index for your blog that is easily read by search engines.

Ron explained that we had one at one time, but we’d not yet reinstalled it after our most recent upgrad. In the past week, after installing this sitemap, our traffic from search engines has increased an average of 42% daily. I’d say it was a change that has been well worth it. If you’re a self-hosted blogger, you might want to give it a try.

Ron has installed this plug-in for us - Google XML (Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress). (Also, here is another Wordpress Plugin that creates a sitemap. If you’re using Blogger, Google will automatically create a sitemap for you, but you may want to submit the sitemap to the other search engines; Also, here’s some helpful info for Blogger.com users.)