Eparadise-india blog

WordPress is an open source content management system and blogging platform. It has made its mark in the world of active bloggers. WordPress carries off the bell with a number of highly useful applications and plugins for the use of bloggers. The only downside of this blogging-oriented CMS is that it is vulnerable to be hacked. Keeping your WordPress site updated is a way to prevent hackers from hacking the site. It is recommended by the creators of WordPress to keep updating the installed WordPress in a website. Some serious mistakes that webmasters usually make prevent them from updating the WordPress sites. I have essayed this article to provide some tips on how to update Wordpress for your benefit.

Difference between WordPress Core Files and Theme Files

The tips and techniques of updating WordPress are within the grip of few bloggers. Even experts don’t dare to undertake the task as they labor under the thought that the existing design and functionality of websites installed on WordPress may be affected. In fact, the lack of grasp over the manipulation of the WordPress core and theme files is the root cause of their reluctance. The files that WordPress requires to operate a website normally are the core files. You can download the core files from http://wordPress.org/download. The files that determine the look and feel of a website are theme files. Theme files come with widgets and plugins that help customize the look of websites. The package of WordPress download core files does not include WordPress theme files.

How the Difference is Related to Updating WordPress

Now the question is how the difference between the WordPress theme files and core files is related to updating WordPress. What you need to edit to keep your WordPress site updated are only theme files, widget and plugin files. It is an easy and widely practiced WordPress updating technique. Make sure not editing the core files while developing the WordPress site. Hence, you should know where your theme and core files are stored or located. If the core files are edited and WordPress is updated, you will lose all of the changes. Updating WordPress sounds very impractical if the core files are edited. That is why many webmasters do not take it to task because of their fear of website malfunction.

Updating WordPress without Editing the Core Files

How to update WordPress in order to add certain functionality to a website without editing the core files is a vital question. Installing a particular plug-in to serve the purpose is the answer. Using specific plugins, you can update WordPress to make your website functionally advanced even without editing the core files. What will you do when no plugins offer the functionality that you need? You can log on to http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/ for help. Editing the theme files and specific functional plugins when your website is at the development stage is better than dealing with functionality problems at the time of updating WordPress.

“Manual updating” and “automatic updating” are the two fundamental ways to update WordPress. The former is time-consuming while the later is efficient when time is a considerable matter. The automatic upgrade entails making changes in the WordPress dashboard. Keep your eyes to my next blog focusing on the step-by-step process of “manual updating” and “automatic upgrade”.

In the present era of social networking, one’s social media profiles bears evidence to one’s online identity. Product promotion, brand visibility, business publicity, blogging, networking, fun and gaming are the bread and butter applications of social media. That is why; promoting social media profiles is an unavoidable issue. The use of WordPress plugins makes it easier to perform the task by integrating your social media profiles with your WordPress blog. WordPress is two in one – a blogging platform and a content management system. Promoting your social media profiles using WordPress plugins is as important as promoting your WordPress blogs using social media applications. I have assorted a few highly innovative WordPress plugins for your benefit.

DandyID Services – with a support for nearly 330 social networks, the DandyID Services is the most useful WordPress extension. You can integrate any of your social media profiles with your WordPress blog using this plugin. It requires the user to create a free account with DandyID. The plugin is customizable.

Social Media Page – This WordPress plugin comes handy for social butterflies. It is supportive for near about 140 social networks. It lets you integrate your social media profiles with any page or post. Using the plugin, you can link to your social networking profiles instead of cramming the sidebar with multiple icons.

Social Profilr – Though not all inclusive, this plugin is useful for WordPress bloggers with 14 important social media profiles. The Social Profilr works with a simple line of code (HTML or non HTML). It integrates the social media profiles with the WordPress About page.

FriendFeed Activity Widget – It is a popular lifestreaming plugin, convenient to use. What you need to use the plugin is a FriendFeed account. You can set it up simply by logging in to your account. It allows you to keep Twitter @replies hid on your WordPress blog pages. It is easy to use because of its minimalistic design.

Lifestream – This plugin offers an independent use. It does not entail a third party account to keep your social media profiles in tune with your WordPress blog. You can utilize it either as a sidebar widget or an icon on a WordPress page or blog post. Lifestream too comes with the option to hide Twitter @replies from the stream of your social media activities.

Lifestream.fm – This plugin offers support for the largest number of social networks to let your stream your social media activity onto your WordPress blog. You need to have an account with the Lifestream.fm. Setting it up as a sidebar widget is simple. The only downside of this plugin is the display of all your tweets including @replies.

Retaggr – Supportive for over 180 social networks, Retaggr lets you not only promote your social media profiles but also the profile information of your commenters from the tiny icon next to the comments. The social media profile information of the commenters pops up at the rolling of the mouse over the icon.

Social Profiles – This plugin is tailor-made for multi-authored blogs and sites with registered users. It lets your visitors register for your WordPress blogs to promote their own social media profiles through effective comments on your blog posts. The Social Profiles plugin provides fields for the visitors to put their usernames for ten social networks.

WP Twitip ID – It is a Twitter oriented plugin. It integrates your social media profiles with the comment form of your WordPress blog. It requires your commenters to have Twitter account. Inserting an extra line of code in the comment template file of your WordPress blog, this plugin provides a field for the commenters to put their Twitter usernames.

Tweetmeme – Tweetmeme is among the plugins to promote both blog posts and social media profiles simultaneously. Akin to the Digg style vote button, this plugin lets your readers retweet your posts easily. By default, it retweets a post as ‘RT @tweetmeme” along with the post title and URL. It is customizable in size. It comes with an option to let you select its position. It can be displayed on your RSS feed.

Hurry up to use these WordPress plugins for promoting your social media profiles and get the best of social networks. Make sure to let me know your feedback.

Pagination is a method of segmenting links to the content of web pages. It is a good SEO with impact on the search engine ranking of websites. The search engine accessibility of a website is not beyond the influence of pagination. The segmentation of links to the website content through pagination reduces the time of crawling web pages for search engine spiders. It is one of the best practices to make search engine bots reach the content-rich pages in only a few clicks. It also impacts Google’s algorithmic ranking system.

Why Pagination is a Must Requirement

An easy access to the core of the website content for search engine spiders is the greatest benefit of pagination. A user-friendly and easily accessible website has to be search engine friendly at any cost. In accordance with Google’s norms, pages that contain no more than one hundred internal or external links are easily accessible, efficiently crawlable and certainly indexable. What makes pagination essential is a need to facilitate the access of search engine crawlers to the content-rich pages of a website containing hundreds or thousands of links.

It is essential to determine the number of pages of results that should be displayed in the pagination. Determining the number of links that an average results page will display is imperative, too. The links to the content should be segmented and categorized properly. The improper pagination at times leads to content duplication that is search engines’ pet hate. There are several options to execute pagination with an eye to perfection.

In some cases, there are many results pages and links to segment them under subcategories. When the number of pages and links is too large to be paginated, create more subcategories to do away with the problem. The pagination of links to the content through sub categorization is a good SEO with enhancement of a website’s search engine health. Sometimes, it is not enough to create a number of sub categories. If a website is too large, extensive pagination is your requirement. Here are some dos to follow and some don’ts to avoid in such cases.

Some Dos for Pagination

Keep one hundred as the link capacity of each page. Link to the content of as many pages as possible under one category. Make sure to keep the pages with newer content at the peak of the results list. It will boost the flow of link juice to those pages. Make sure linking to the relevant categories and subcategories in order to keep up the flow of link juice throughout the entire site. Don’t forget to link back to the top results pages from each paginated URLs.

Some Don’ts for Pagination

Getting only a few paginated pages and links displayed is among the don’ts. It is one of the don’ts to link to the pages in the front and at the end of a pagination list because it keeps the link juice flowing only to the beginning and the end of the list. Randomizing the paginated results over and again to distribute link juice throughout the site is a don’t. A website with static architecture is easy to be accessed, crawled and indexed. Using AJAX to get into the deep of the website content is among the don’ts from SEO perspectives. In most of cases, the content of titles and Meta descriptions for paginated results is copied from the top page. It is the bane of a site’s search engine health as it leads to duplicate content issues.

There is no end to the efforts of SEO professionals to get the best of Google Buzz in order to make the most of promotional activities. Google Buzz possesses the potential of FriendFeed by accepting content with strength of more than 140 characters and retains the essence of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook in marketing content. SEO pros can make much of this Gmail based social networking application to work for brand promotion in Google.

The launch of Google Buzz is preceded by the release of Google Profiles. Every Gmail account holder owns a Google profile. The introduction of Buzz has kicked the importance of this Google feature as a brand portal. You need to customize, manage and maintain your Google profile as a web platform for brand promotion. You can optimize your bio with keywords related to your brand for the “about me” section in the profile. You can enrich your profile by adding the URLs of your website, blog and social media accounts.

Benefits of Having Google Profiles for Brand Promotion

If you keep your buzzes on your brand public, they will get noticed on your Google profile. By googling your profile in Google search engine, the followers can access your buzzes. Make sure to optimize your buzzes with specific brand-related keywords for effective brand promotion. If your Google profile is in the cache of Google, the buzzes too will be indexed by the Google bot. Visitors to your Google profile will follow the links to your website and blog. Your Google profile is a hub of personal and professional information about you to share with your visitors and followers. In brief, it serves as a base of your personal brand identity.

Create Contacts and Network with Them

Create contacts and maintain a stable relationship with them to enhance your personal brand identity on Google Buzz. Opposite to your Twitter profile, your Buzz account is not open to all. Anyone can follow you on Twitter. In case of Buzz, you are to be followed only by contacts in your Gmail account. Widen the circle of your Google contacts by adding more contacts to your Gmail account. Sharing useful information through buzzes and leaving comments on the buzzes of your followers are among the utilities of Google Buzz for brand promotion.

Promote the Google Profile of Yours

The Google profile of yours displays a combo of your personal and professional information along with the URLs of your individual site, blog, YouTube channel, Facebook page and other social media profiles as well. It is better to promote your Google profile page instead of each individual social media profile. Promoting your Google profile with buzzes means promoting your personal brand identity.

Tips on Where to Promote the Google Profile

Optimize your email signature with the URL of your Google profile. If you write a guest post for some blog or article site, optimize the author’s bio with the URL of your Google profile. Put the link to your Google profile on your Twitter profile. Keep updating your Google status. Use the Google Profile URL while commenting on the blogs and articles of others. Let your business cards display your Google profile URL. Last but not the least, leave the URL of your Google profile in your social networking profiles.

Almost everyone gets into a tizzy over the launch of a new internet application and feels crazy about using it. Evidently Google Buzz, a new Gmail-integrated application is the focus of attention all around. Now, SEO personnel and bloggers are making efforts to utilize the potential of Google Buzz as a web traffic resource. Buzz can be integrated with not only social networks but also self-hosted WordPress blogs. I have come across a few Google Buzz plugins and add-ons that are useful for WordPress bloggers.

Google Buzz Buttons

Google Buzz buttons are nifty Buzz buttons integrate Buzz with a WordPress blog. These buttons get your blog posts displayed on your Buzz homepage through links from those posts to Google Reader that is connected with the Google Buzz account of yours. Adding the button “Buzz This” to each WordPress blog post is the application the Google Buzz Button plugin. Displaying the button at the top or bottom of the post content is after your choice. The dimension of the button in height and width is customizable.

WP Google Buzz

WP Google Buzz is another useful button plugin to ingrate Buzz with self-hosted WordPress blogs. Much akin to Google Buzz Button plugin, it packs in a few more options. You can customize the appearance of the button by increasing or decreasing its dimension. The icon of this Buzz plugin is available in a variety of styles. Choose a particular style in keeping your WordPress blog setup. You can add it to your posts manually.

WP Buzzer

WP Buzzer is the most recommended of Google Buzz Button plugins for the use of WordPress bloggers. The button’s style is almost similar to that of the Google Buzz Button. The options regarding where to set this plugin are in your hand. You can make the button shine on the homepage, pages, and posts or in the RSS feed. The plugin is available both in small and large versions.

Light Social

Light Social is one step ahead of the Google Buzz Button. It takes a different approach to integrate Buzz with self-hosted WordPress blogs. It inserts not only Google Buzz but also other social share links like Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and LinkedIn at the bottom of each WordPress blog post. Light Social is a good use to get your blogs noticed on various social media platforms.

Buzz in Your Sidebar

The Google Buzz plugin that lets the visitors to or the followers of your WordPress blog share the posts to their Google Buzz accounts is Buzz in Your Sidebar. The biggest advantage of using this plugin is that you can display your online social media activities collectively in one place. The Google Buzz ER a cool widget can make your public Buzzes visible on your WordPress blog. You can define the number of Buzz entries that you wish to display.

Get in haste to integrate Google Buzz with Your self-hosted WordPress blog using above-mentioned Buzz plugins and let visitors to buzz your posts in their Google Buzz accounts.

Google is always a few steps ahead of its rivals through innovations. A new release from the Google store is Google Buzz, a Gmail-integrated utility to boost social networking. A boon for social and business purposes, Google Buzz is accessible through Gmail. The use of this innovative Gmail tab is to share information, updates, links, photos and videos with your Gmail contacts. It automatically sets you up to follow those who you email and chat the most. Google Buzz is supposed to contend successfully with two social networking giants – Facebook and Twitter. Let us see how user-friendly this Google innovation is.

40 out of your Gmail and Gtalk contacts will be automatically added to the list of your friends in Google Buzz. You can see update or comment from anyone in your friend list in the inbox. The interface of each of your followers in Google Buzz features four options – view recent post, view people following him or her, view people he or she is following and block him or her. There is another option “follow back” clicking which you can follow the person who is following you.

Google Buzz allows you a choice to either make your buzzes go public or keep them private. Only your Buzz followers can view your private updates, photos and videos. It ensures your online privacy and protection. Your public updates will be visible on your Google Profile page. If your profile page has already been indexed in Google, your public buzzes too are indexable in Google search engine.

Google Buzz can keep you connected to Picasa, Flickr, Twitter, Google Chat and Google Reader. The pictures from your Flickr or Picasa album will be displayed in your Buzz profile. They will show full screen if clicked on their thumbnails. You can modify the pictures as you wish and set them by saving changes. YouTube videos too will go visible in your Buzz profile. A click on any of them will let it play online.

Adding to the wonders of Google Buzz is the display of tweets from your Twitter profile in the Buzz profile. It is a good platform for compact and concise group conversations as real-time updates and comments appear in the bar on the Buzz profile pages. Buzzing is more advantageous than tweeting since the character strength of a buzz is not limited as in case of tweets.

Google Buzz, the latest release from Google is a reason for smartphone users to rejoice. It will be available as a web application on smartphones, Apple iPhones and Android-backed devices. It is accessible from your smartphone on logging on to buzz.google.com through your mobile browser where as Android devices and iPhones are supporting it. Other mobile applications too will turn up with this Gmail social networking utility very soon.

There is anticipation in the world of internet marketers that Google Buzz will revolutionize the way internet marketing is done. Some opine that it can get success over email marketing. Hold your breath, my friends. I will turn up with focus on the implications of Google Buzz for online marketing in my next blog.

In a SEO campaign, keyword research and analysis is the very first step towards optimizing websites for search engines. Searching for and ranking of websites in search engines is keyword based. Search engine spiders track only those sites whose keywords relate to specific search queries or phrases. In many SEO campaigns, researching and analyzing keywords is done at the surface level. I would like to recommend a few ways for SEO professionals to put flesh on this primary phase of a SEO campaign.

Free Tools for Keyword Research and Analysis – Some keyword research and analysis tools are available free on the web to get the task of finding out relevant keywords done for you. Google Adwords Keyword Tool, MSN AdCenter Research Keywords Tool and Wordtracker Keyword Tool are the mostly used such tools. These are efficient enough to help you execute it expertly.

Temporal Fluctuations – Knowing when specific search queries concerning a particular website are in demand is helpful. It can help you know which search phrases are in competition and when the competition is high. The application of SEO efforts for keyword research and analysis is based on the results. Target some other different search terms if the popularity of existing search phrases has dropped down in the search market.

Top Ranking Domains – To assess the relevance of your targeted keywords it is essential to know which domain ranks higher for those keywords than others. The outcome of this experiment is a great help to create a search engine friendly domain name by combining popular keywords and a top-ranking domain in a string.

Vertical Results – A measure on the reach of some specific search phrases related to a website, across the online search world will help you determine keywords for the website. Search for your targeted terms in the various departments of major search engines like local, product, news, images, blog, and video, and identify the vertical results appearing in the top listings from 10 to 20.

Searcher Intent – Knowing the objective of visitors is crucial to research and analyze keywords for a website. It will help you know if most of the visitors prefer using single word search terms or search phrases or queries in strings of words. It is somewhat difficult to know the search intentions of visitors as they are not steadfast in using the same search key phrases over and again.

Top Related Queries – Evaluate the popularity of other search phrases or queries that are related and relevant to your keywords. Pick up the most potential of these and add them to the list of your keywords in order to extend the reach of your website across the search world of search giants like Google, Yahoo, Bing and MSN.

Fresh Web (News, Blogosphere, Tweetosphere) Activity - The fresh web or the entire social media sphere can help you see the frequent appearance of your targeted keywords in the content of blogs, websites, forum posts, feeds and more. It is particularly recommendable to identify and follow the emerging innovative trends of keyword research and analysis.

Potential Relevance – The best way to determine potential keywords is to evaluate the relevance of search terms to the content of your website. Only the search terms that are related to your website content from multiple perspectives can generate valuable traffic in bulk.

Make sure to integrate this keyword research and analysis policy to your SEO campaigns for website promotion.

The target of a business website to make sales online may be one country or several countries or the whole world. The geographical extent of a website depends on the number of its hosting locations. “Geo-targeting” aspects like domain and hosting location influence the ranking of websites in Google. The more the “geo-targeting” aspects of a website are improved the more relevant the search results on the website are. The factors that are supposed to affect the “geo-targeting” aspects of websites in Google are the focus of my attempt on how to get the best of Google for website promotion.

The effect of using country-based top level domains or TDLs on the search engine ranking of websites is not negligible. The relevance of search results on a particular website varies with the effectiveness of country-based TLDs. If a searcher from the UK uses www.google.com to look for a website with the UK based domain, the website may rank 81. If a searcher uses www.google.uk to look for the website, it may rank at the 10th position. Search results on a website with a particular country-based TLD are highly relevant to searchers from the same country.

If a specific country is your target, use the country code in the domain name of your website. In the target location, the website will turn up with better Google search rankings. It is not advisable to use a country code TLD, if the reach of your website is up to several countries. Rather, it is better using a generic TLD like .com, .org, or .net that is not associated with any country code.

The relationship between the hosting location or server IP location of a website and its Google search rankings is another “geo-targeting” aspect. A website that is hosted in a specific country gets better rankings in the Google search engine of that country. Hosting the website in its target country is an easier method to get the website positioned in the first search result page of Google.

The registrant address of a website’s owner also matters to the SERP ranking of the website. It is applicable for business websites in particular. Your registrant location should be the country that is the target of your business website. Google takes into account the registrant address of a website to determine the search result relevance of the website in a specific country. So, get your address registered in the target country of your website.

Other “geo-targeting” factors than those mentioned above to put into application for the improved ranking, enhanced visibility of and increased traffic to websites in Google search engine -

• Regional listings in Yahoo directory are paid listings. SEO experts claim that websites benefit from the “geo-targeting” factors, if they are listed in the regional section.
• Regional listings in DMOZ are free listings. They are as beneficial as regional listings in Yahoo directory. Google considers DMOZ data in determining the ranking of websites.
• The language a website is written has a bearing on the search engine relevance and ranking of the website. That is why websites written in Russian language are largely visible in www.google.ru.
• Back links from UK-based websites help improve the ranking of a website in www.google.co.uk. The same is true about external links of a website.

At the end of 2009, Google took the online world by storm with the launch of its innovative real-time search service. Google’s real-time search is meant to provide the latest updates on a visitor’s query from across the World Wide Web. There has been lots of anticipation about the impact of this new search service from Google on the art and science of SEO. Prominent visibility in the search result pages of search giants is the key to the increasing volume of traffic and the number of conversions for websites. This time my concern is how to get a website or blog listed in real time search results.

Less-than-one-minute old updates from major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Sphinn etc. are likely to get noticed among real-time search results. By indexing updates on your website from social bookmarking and networking sites, Google is supposed to propel the page ranking of the website. So it is the wise of you to build and boost your presence on social media sites in order to reap views amidst Google’s real-time search results.

The titles of your updates from social media sites play an important role to get you in the notice of the Google search spider. So, optimizing the titles of your updates needs a special consideration. Make the titles indexable and clickable by optimizing them with specific keywords that pique up visitors’ interest in your updates. Proper optimization of the titles works like a million bucks dollar from SEO perspectives for the enhancement of your visibility in Google’s real-time search results.

Enrich your social media profiles with an increase in the number of online friends and followers. Adding more and more friends to your list makes your social media profiles weigh heavy in search engines. The higher the number of your friends is the higher the number of votes, views and visitors for your updates is. The more your updates are shared on Facebook and retweeted on Twitter by your friends and followers the more chances are there to get them noticed in real-time search results.

The consideration of other such important factors as tweet optimization, Facebook profile optimization and social media profile maintenance, matters to the visibility of your updates in real-time search results. Maintain networking with your followers and keep your profile updated to let them know about your activities. It is crucial to keep up with the followers from the field of your interests in order to get updates retweeted and shared by them. Check and enhance the relevance of your posts on social media sites as it is a known fact that the Google search bot indexes updates on relevant posts.

Let the visitors to your website share your articles or blogs across social media sites. So, optimize your web pages with buttons like Digg, Tweetmeme, Facebook Connect, StumbleUpon etc. A single click on those buttons will get your posts noticed across social bookmarking and networking sites. Channelization of the content bears fruits for not only the publicity of your website among mass visitors but also its enhanced visibility in Google’s real-time search results.

Come out of the shell to get your content noticed across major social media sites and listed in Google’s real-time search results.

The enhanced search engine visibility of websites is a target of SEO professionals. XML sitemap is a search engine friendly tool to boost the Google presence of websites. Absolutely different from a HTML sitemap, it is not accessible by or visible to visitors. The XML sitemap of a website is meant to help search engine spiders crawl the site. Whenever the website or its content is updated, this sitemap highlights the update and makes it findable to the search bots.

Benefits of Using an XML Sitemap

Informing the Google search bot about all canonical URLs in a site is the function of the site’s XML sitemap. The canonical URLs are non-findable in a normal crawling process. In combination with robots.txt, the XML sitemap reconfirms the canonical URLs and makes it easier for search bots to crawl the site. The removal of duplicate content URLs in the site is one of the benefits of using this sitemap. It helps the important pages retain link juices that improve the site’s Google ranking.

An XML sitemap is more helpful than a normal web sitemap that finds it impossible to help the search bots crawl a big e-commerce site with hundreds of category URLs and thousands of product URLs. The competency of an XML sitemap to list and display a huge number of URLs is helpful for newly-launched websites in terms of visibility and indexibility.

Problems of Using a Traditional XML Sitemap Generator

The problems that emerge from the application of traditional tools to create a sitemap can be corrected through the customization of a Google XML sitemap. One of the potential problems of using a traditional XML sitemap generator is that the traditional XML sitemap generator tends to list non-canonical URLs containing the same content. That it takes a long time to crawl unimportant URLs is another major problem. What is worse than this are search results including the unimportant URLs.

You can avoid these problems by customizing the Google XML sitemap of your website. The following is a 12-step process to customize the Google XML sitemap –

1. Download Xenu sleuth and install it in the computer. Then, go from File to Check URL and put the root URL of a website to browse it with Xenu sleuth.
2. In Xenu sleuth, navigate from File to Export to TAB separated file to file name. Use your site’s domain name as the file name and “Text files (*.txt)” as the file type. Create an Excel compatible .csv file by clicking “save”.
3. Go from File to file name to save the Xenu sleuth crawl session. You can use the same domain name but the file type must be *.xen. Go to File and then to Exit to close the Xenu sleuth session.
4. Clinking the right mouse button on the *.txt file in the desktop, select “Open with” and then choose Microsoft Excel to see the screen shot.
5. Navigate across File -> Save As -> file name to save the file in Excel format. Choose Microsoft Excel Workbook that comes under “save as type” using the same domain name. You can save it on desktop for your convenience.
6. Move to Data -> Filter -> Auto filter to activate the Excel drop down filter. Select “Custom” by clicking the drop down arrow in column C to filter “External URLs”.
7. Select “Contains” under column D and choose “text/html” by following the same filtering process. It will display the “text/html URLs of the website that Google can index.
8. Remove the unimportant rows that Google does not recommend for indexing by using Custom filter further in column A. In the same way, you can continue filtering other unimportant file extensions like .js, .xml, .css, .doc and non-HTML file types.
9. Make sure that the filtered URLS are not blocked in robots.txt. Make your way from the Google Webmaster Tools account -> site configuration -> Crawler Access. Then copy the URLs from the notepad and paste them under “URLS Specify the URLs and user-agents to test against”.
10. By clicking the “Test” button, check if blocked URLs are there. Remove the blocked URLS from the notepad files. The remaining URLs are your website’s canonical URLs.
11. Check if the canonical URLs contain a header status of “200 OK”. Remove the URLs that redirect to another page and do not give 200 OK as a header status. You can do it using a bulk checker.
12. The platform is ready to create a custom XML sitemap, once the canonical URLs of your website are well identified. Go to the URL: http://www.php-developer.org/PHPXML-sitemap-generator.php. Copy all of the canonical URLs and paste them there. Make sure to enter the home page URL first and then other URLs per line.