File this one under “the intersection of RSS and search engine
placement”.

With its new sitemap service, Google has given webmasters, and SEO firms, an
unparalleled amount of control over how websites are indexed.

As explained on its website, href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps”>Google Sitemaps are lists
of urls from a website.  Using specific XML tagging a webmaster can list
the pages of a site, and then send the XML file to Google.  It’s implied
that a googlebot will troll through a site for the urls on the list.

An excerpt from the href=”https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html#what”
target=_blank>Google Sitemaps FAQ:

Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand
our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By
placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to
find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl
your site accordingly.

As is Google’s standard web crawling policy the search engine company doesn’t
guarantee that every url will be visited.  However the advantage of
creating a Google sitemap should jump out at you.

Foremost, we now have some recourse for site architectures that seem
difficult for bots to spider, i.e. widowed pages, non-text-based links,
dynamically generated urls.  Google Sitemaps also gets around the whole
submitting your top-level url versus having your site linked on a website
already indexed debate.

An interesting note from the sitemaps FAQ:

We also support the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for
metadata harvesting, a popular protocol in the library world. If your sitemaps
are already available in OAI-PMH version 2.0 format, you are welcome to submit
these. We also accept RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 syndication feeds, using the
link/lastMod fields.

Your blog (and your main website for that matter) should be taking advantage
of RSS syndication.  So why not submit your feed to Google?

First create your initial sitemap by hand or by using the href=”http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422″>Python-based
site-mapping tool Google recommends. After you’ve submitted that file, and
the majority of your pages are showing up in Google SERPS, submit your RSS feed
to Google Sitemaps.

This would ensure that Google is aware of each new content item you publish,
the moment you publish it.  And that, at least, is worth something.