My posts don't show up in Google

Have you tried submitting a post to Google via Google Webmaster Tools? When you do, Google will tell you if there are any problems.

I have my sitemap setup in Webmaster tools. I’m using Yoast. How would I manually submit a post and do I need to keep doing that?

Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and go to Crawl –> Fetch as Google.

Cool, that seemed to work fine. If I submit my homepage to the index will it drawl all the other posts on the site too, or do I need to submit them individually?

Google will eventually crawl everything. Google Webmaster Tools can expedite the process. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend submitting every single page of your site, but if you want to try and speed up crawling of a number of URLs, submit a page with links (like your home page) and instruct Google to crawl the page and the pages it links to.

Just to be clear, none of this guarantees Google index and rank your content. Google will do what Google wants.

Thanks for your help. They seem to be appearing in search results now.

Should I include tags in my sitemap or just categories?

I think it’s difficult for tag pages to be used effectively and most sites just end up creating duplicate pages with them. My personal preference is to set tag pages to be excluded from sitemaps and to also be noindex via Yoast’s SEO plugin.

Awesome. Thanks for your help! I will mark this as resolved.