If you work in SEO or are a web developer, or even if you’re neither of these things but just happen to run a website, then you know how important it is for your site to have an XML sitemap. The sitemap makes it super easy for search engines like Google to see what’s on your site, which in turn makes your site a lot easier for search engines to index. If you know that your WordPress site needs a sitemap but you don’t know the first thing about how to create one, don’t worry — there’s a plugin for that!
The Google XML Sitemaps plugin allows you to quickly and easily create a sitemap with no coding knowledge necessary. Once you install the plugin, all the work is pretty much done for you, as the plugin generates the sitemap on its own. The sitemap won’t just make it easier for a search engine like Google to index your site — it will pretty much work for any search engine, including Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com. With the sitemap, it’ll be so much easier for crawlers from these search engines to understand the structure of your site and be able to efficiently find and retrieve content.
The plugin supports WordPress pages and posts that have all sorts of URL structure, including custom URL structure. It’ll also notify all the major search engines every time you publish a new post, to help get your new content indexed as quickly as possible. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin gives you many options for configuration and customization, but if you’re not too sure what you need out of a sitemap and are just generating one to improve your overall SEO, you don’t even need to bother with making changes to the default settings. Just install and activate the plugin and you should be good to go.
