How to Find Blog Posts faster with Sitemap

Earlier I discussed how to interlink manually with WordPress Insights Plugin and the plugin is really helpful for a lot of reasons. But one problem I sometimes face using this plugin is it doesn’t always show the exact matching keyword. Say I would like to find a post which has the word “content” in the Title. When I search using “content” it doesn’t bring up any result for TheTopBlogger. Then I need to be more specific such as “content theft” or “content ideas” etc. to come up to the content. Still I miss to find my target post sometime.

So what is the solution? Here is a quick tip from my personal experience.

I believe you must have sitemap for your blog, right? If you do not have one, create it today through a sitemap plugin and submit sitemap to Google as well as Sitemap to Bing for faster indexing.

How to find Posts with Sitemap

While drafting your post, open your blog sitemap on a seperate tab on your browser. When you are not finding any post through WP Insights plugin, search the post in your sitemap. Use the find option or press Ctrl+F and type any word from the URL of the post you are looking for. This will highlights all the URLs in your site those have the word in it. Jump through the search by clicking next until you find your required post. Now copy the URL and manually link it with your targeted anchor text.

Note that Sitemap indexes URL only (not post Title), so make sure that the keyword is in the URL. In the following picture, I typed “nofollow” and it has found all 4 URLs that have the word “nofollow”.

Apart from helping in above situation, Sitemaps can also be useful for you to find any post or have a quick look of all the indexed posts and their last update date. When you visit a new blog where pagination doesn’t exist, it is difficult to find the total number of posts in that blog. You can find the total number of pages through Google as site:example.com, but Google do not display actual number of pages correctly depending on your blog settings. Some blogs do not make category and tag noindex, so the number of indexed posts are usually higher than the actual. In this situation, you can find out the information of total number of posts through its Sitemap.

Sitemap has too many posts to count, but you still want to find out the  exact number of posts? Just select all (Ctrl+A) and copy the data of Sitemap and paste it in a excel file and you can find total number of posts from the total number of rows in the excel sheet.