Sitemaps are very useful for users and for readers, and when ever we talk about SEO of WordPress, we should create WordPress blog sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster tool and Bing Webmaster tools for faster indexing and crawling of our site. Now, the big question is how to generate sitemaps for our WordPress blog? In WordPress, there are many plugins which will help you to do it and I will be talking about one Such plugin which I use here at ShoutMeLoud and it will help you for your blog too.
Google XML sitemaps plugin to Create WordPress sitemap:
Sitemap feature is recently added to WordPress SEO by yoast plugin but I prefer to use Google XML sitemaps plugin, which is also a free plugin and offers many configuration for better optimization of your sitemap. Best part is, it’s a dedicated WordPress sitemap plugin and it’s been 3 years I’m using this plugin and it keeps getting constant update with every new release of WordPress.
To help Google indexing your blog properly, you need to submit a sitemap of your blog, so that each and every page of your blog can be indexed by Google and other search engines.
Google XML sitemaps WordPress plugin helps to create a dynamic sitemap of WordPress blog which is compatible to Google, Bing and yahoo webmaster tools. After creating sitemap all you need to do is submit sitemap to search engine webmaster tools and as soon as you will publish a new post,your sitemap will be automatically updated. To make the most of sitemap, you should point one link from your footer to your sitemap page this ensure the proper indexing of all your links.
Here is how you can use Google XML Sitemap generator plugin:
Features of Google XML sitemap
-
- User interface to customize all parameters like priorities etc.
- Available in many languages
- Generates automatically a sitemap for all types of WordPress pages
- Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments
- Notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and YAHOO about changes via ping
- Includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap
- Generates a static XML file as well as a zipped version
Download Google Xml sitemap plugin
So, once you have created sitemap, go ahead and submit it to major search engines. You can follow below two articles, to get started:
Do let me know if you still have any query regarding sitemap creation of your WordPress blog. If you find this article useful, do subscribe to my Email newsletter for more such updates.
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Article by Harsh Agrawal
Harsh has written 1206 articles.
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{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
This is an excellent plugin and does all the hard work for you just by setting it up and forgetting about it. It would be nice if WP actually incorporated this into WP so that no plugin is needed.
What do you think?
It’s among the top 5 absolutely essential plugins for WordPress. Others would be the Akismet plugin, Database backup plugin, All-in-on SEO, and FeedSmith
This was the first plugin that i used after setting up my blog !!
A must use..
This is a best plugin for submit site in most famous search engines like Bing,Yahoo,Altavista and Google.
Yeah, no doubt this is a great plugin.. I’ve used it and got my blog indexed with google at a much faster pace.
I also use this plugin on my wordpress blog and rate it 10/10 its simply a must have!
This Tool automatically submits the posts to Google SiteMaps!
AWesome!
Must Try
No doubt this is one of the best plugins! But one thing is that it uses so much of memory! So better we disable automatic generation of Sitemap and do it manually!
It’s among the top 5 absolutely essential plugins for WordPress. Others would be the Akismet plugin, Database backup plugin, All-in-on SEO, and FeedSmith
i am using blogger so i am manually submitting my sitemap on webmaster tools is that okay??
Hi!
Is it necessary to place a sitemap link in the footer section of your blog?
I noticed that some blogs, including yours, do it.
Is there an SEO benefit?
@Jeff
Yes it helps bots to find your sitemap quickly and follow all links in it..It helps in better crawling and indexing of your site.
That’s great tutorial, my problems now is how to turn the sitemap generated with this plugin into html and make it appear on a sitemap page of my blog for readers to see and not only xml which is for search engines.
Thanks
@Azubulke
It’s an old plugin but works fine with latest version: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html-sitemap/
Hi Harsh I already installed xml sitemap plugin. But it’s not display all the post of my blog. Please guide me. This is my link – http://nirmalblog.com/sitemap.xml
@Jospeh
Not sure why it’s happening, but it may be happening because of your Permalink structure. You can also go to sitemap settings, and rebuild the sitemap. Hope that will help… Also try to use pretty permalink, instead of category slug permalink.
Thanks for your guidance Harsh.
Harsh, mine does not automatically generate when I publish a new post, I have to click on manually generate new sitemap. Please any help?
i have activated google -xml- sitemap plugin but there is no such tab “xml -sitemap” in my settings menu of my wordpress