I skipped the Q&A last week in order to get some good questions rolling in the door and to find a good day of the week to commit to the feature post. I’ve settled on Thursdays for the Q&A with GrandmasterB feature; since it allows me to get things caught up over the weekend and more time to put together a clear and concise answer. Don’t forget to send me your questions and if your question is published you’ll get a free linkback from GrandmasterB and 100 EntreCard credits for your bankroll. Now onto the question for this week.

My boy Cuzzy (Cuzoogle.com) wrote me an email the other day asking me the following question:

I have recently started a new blog and want to set up a google site map. I downloaded the plugin and activated it but I am still having trouble getting my site map to work. It says I need to make sure the file is writeable and this was where I got lost. Can you help?

Cuzzy, this is actually a very common problem with installing plug-ins that need to be able to “write” to a given file on your server. In regards to your question the first thing you need to do is create the file for the sitemap. In order to do this you can use any text editor, I suggest using Notepad or if you have it Dreamweaver or another HTML editor. You don’t have to add any code to it, just save it as sitemap.xml and then upload it to the root directory of your site (wherever your index.php file is for WordPress).

If you don’t have an FTP client to upload your files I highly recommend installing FireFTP for Firefox. You should be able to download, install and setup the FTP client in record time; it is very user friendly. The only information that you will need to enter is your host (aka URL), username and password; once you have that hit connect and you should see the directory of your website in the right hand column. From here you will need to upload the sitemap.xml file to the home directory. Once it is uploaded right click it and choose “properties” (see image).

Once you have clicked on properties, it will bring up a window for you showing you the file permissions. Each checkbox has a numeric value, and for this case we need that number to add up to 0777. What you’ll need to do is make sure that you check Read, Write and Execute under each column and then click OKAY (see image). You’ve now changed the file permissions for sitemap.xml.

After you have changed the file properties, go back to your WordPress Admin Panel and click on settings and then access the XML-Sitemap settings. Under the top section labeled “Status” you may still see a warning that the file isn’t writeable, that is okay. It doesn’t automatically check the files if you’ve made a change. Simply click on the “rebuild sitemap manually” link and it should write the sitemap and create a new compressed file as well. One thing to note is that under the Location of the Sitemap File you should check automatically; that will save you time in the long run.

That’s pretty much it for the XML-Sitemap plugin settings though. Once you have everything setup, you should begin to see more activity from the search engines crawling your content. If you haven’t done so already I highly recommend installing the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin; with that plugin installed you can see when the top three search engines (GoogleBot, Yahoo! and MSN) are crawling your site and how often.

That is all for this week’s Q&A with GrandmasterB. Thank you again, to Cuzzy for his question and your 100 EntreCard Credits are being emailed to you now. Don’t forget if there’s something you’d like to know about hit me up with a question and you too can get a linkback and 100 EntreCard credits if I answer your question on the Q&A.

~ GrandmasterB