Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress Plugin

Do you use an XML sitemap plugin? If not, you should!

What’s an XML sitemap?

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol. ~ Wikipedia

In short, it sends out an update to Google, Bing and Yahoo to let them know you have new stuff. Like an invitation to swing by and crawl your site 😉

How to do it
(Please read this whole post before you do this)

Surf  to Dashboard / Plugins / Add New

Search for “Google XML Sitemaps”

You will see one that is By Arne Brachhold.

Install and activate the plugin.

Now surf to Dashboard / Settings / XML-Sitemap

You will see this … click the “Click here” link.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If I built your site for you, it’s possible we installed another XML site map called “Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite support” by Mario Kostelac. If so, this plugin no longer works properly with Bing and tries to send to Ask.com which no longer takes sitemaps.

Surf  to Dashboard / Plugins

Deactivate that plugin. Now go back to step one above ( Search for “Google XML Sitemaps” ) and install and activate it.

Again surf to Dashboard / Settings / XML-Sitemap

This time you will probably see something like this. Click the ‘rebuild the sitemap’ link

Advanced

When you go to the settings page for this plugin, you will see all kinds of options listed below which allows you to customize it to your needs. Unless you know what you are doing, just use the default settings which work very well.

I am hoping that one of our SEO experts will leave some suggestions on this topic … hint hint!