Google XML Sitemaps Plugin for Wordpress

Posted by Martin Jamieson | April 27, 2008 .

A basic SEO strategy everyone needs to consider is making your site friendly for search engine spiders to crawl (particularly GoogleBot) so that your content can be indexed quickly and thoroughly. The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin for Wordpress blogs is a great place to start and should be a top consideration on every blog you own.

I realise that some of you may not use Wordpress (although you’ll probably find something similar to this on other blogging platforms), but being one of the more popular blogging systems available (and easily the best IMO), I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at what this plugin can offer.

Why should you use this plugin?

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin is essentially a tour guide for search engine spiders. Here’s what it does:

  • Automatically generates a page that shows all the recently updated URL’s on your site, which pages should have the highest priority, the frequency they change and the last time they were changed.
  • It sends notification to Google, MSN and ASK each time you publish a new post or make a change (you can also configure it to send a notification to Yahoo if you enter your Yahoo Application ID Key into the preferences).
  • Can automatically modify or create a robots.txt file that tells all bots the location of your sitemap page.
  • Extremely customisable, let’s you include pages that are outside of your wordpress installation.
  • Available in many languages.

Installation and setup is straight forward, copy the files into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and enable on the plugins page of your Wordpress administration console. You’ll need to visit ’settings > XML - Sitemap’ to set your preferences and generate your first sitemap. The default preferences should be ok, but give them a once over to make sure they suit your blog. This is what the admin panel looks like (click for a bigger pic):

Once your preferences have been set and your first sitemap generated, there are two more things I suggest you take care of before you finish.

  1. Add a link to your sitemap page in your footer, this will help improve it’s visibility.
  2. Create an account with Google Webmaster Tools, tell them about your website and set the location of your sitemap file (this can be repeated with MSN Webmaster Tools and other search engines that support it if you like).

Do you really need this plugin?

As long as you’ve got a good permalink structure and inter-link your posts through categories and contextually within your articles etc. then your pages will probably be indexed just fine (with or without this plugin). From my experience the Google XML Sitemap plugin makes the process a lot quicker (especially for newer blogs) and it also makes good sense to highlight your important pages and post your new articles directly to the search engines in a format they are asking for.

I use this plugin on all my blogs and highly recommended it. Getting your site and key content pages indexed quickly and efficiently is the #1 rule for SEO (if you’re not in the index, anything else you do is irrelevant).

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1 Comment so far
  1. Gilberto Galea June 2, 2008 5:21 pm

    I really new at wordpress blogger user. And I use this plugin. It’s very easy, fast and powerfull. With few minute I was building a sitemap. I didn’t any problem. And I wrote few articles, and was great when I check that the sitemap aggregated those new post.
    Your explain is clear and usefull.
    Thanks by the tip.