The beauty of WordPress is that it is SUPER easy to make sure Google knows your site exists…and to make sure it keeps coming back and checking things out! There are a couple of basic plugins that make it simple to install Google Analytics and have your sitemap created and verified.

You’ll need to make sure you have a Google account before you can finalize the installation of both the analytics plugin and the sitemap plugin. It’s super easy to do and of course it’s free – so make sure you’ve done that before watching the video.

So I’ve realized that one of the biggest challenges for people with WordPress is a lot of the technical side of what needs to be done to make sure your site is optimized. I’m sure that sounds somewhat obvious to many people, but if you’re just getting started out with WordPress, or you’ve managed to get your blog/site set up- you may be in the “what now?” stage. It’s quite possible you’re ready to self host your site too. Either way, as someone who wasn’t very technical until this past year, I can completely understand the frustration or challenges you may be having.

One of the most important pieces to having a website or blog is that people need to know you’re there- and you need to know how they found you. Google has some great free resources to help you get started as well as take your site to the next level- whatever that may be for you.

The first thing to do is to sign up for an account with Google. It’s totally free and there are a ton of resources that will walk you through what you need to do. I’ll also have some videos posted here in the next week or so that walk you through different tasks. But first, get signed up with Google. There are lots of things you can add to your account, but for now you should just start with Google Analytics and Google sitemap (I’d recommend a gmail account too). Once you’ve set up your account you need to download both the analytics plugin and the xml sitemap generator plugin for wordpress. You can find them here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

If you need help uploading these, drop me a line and I can help you get them installed. Just make sure you’ve signed up with Google too!