A sitemap is an XML file that contains information about the URLs associated with your website as well as some other metadata such as when they were last updated. The purpose of the sitemap is to help search engines crawl your site more efficiently.

The Google XML Sitemap plugin will automatically maintain a sitemap for your WordPress blog that is updated every time you publish a new blog post or edit an existing one. Although it is called the “Google” XML Sitemap plugin it will work for all of the major search engines such as Yahoo and MSN as they support the same sitemap protocol.

You can install the plugin to your WordPress blog by logging into the admin dashboard and choosing Add New under Plugins in the left hand sidebar, which will load the Install Plugins admin page.

Search for “sitemap” and click the Install link for Google XML Sitemaps in the search results.  After the plugin is downloaded and installed click the link to activate it.

After the plugin is installed and activated click on XML Sitemaps in the Settings section of the left hand sidebar.

To build the sitemap file for the first time click on the link marked Click Here.

The sitemap.xml and sitemap.gz (compressed version) have now been built and placed in the root of your blog’s URL (eg http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).

The plugin and the WordPress virtual robots.txt file take care of the rest, unless you’ve manually configured your own robots.txt file for your site.  If so, add this line to the robots.txt file so that search engine spiders can locate your sitemap file.

Sitemap: url_to_sitemap

For example:

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

The sitemap is now installed to help search engines crawl and index your blog content.

Tagged as: Plugins, SEO, Sitemap, Sitemaps, WordPress