Usually a good Quality Wordpress theme will already have a Sitemap page template built into it, but if you are using a basic theme without different page templates I suggest you use a plugin to build your sitemap.

The Dagon Design Sitemap plugin. is a great plugin that will automatically build your Sitemap, it’s easy to set up and the end result is a very professional and user friendly Sitemap for your Wordpress website.

The plugin can easily be installed using your favorite FTP client or it can be installed straight from inside of your Wordpress Admin area. You can find the plugin by doing a keyword search using the keywords Dagon Design Sitemap.

After you have installed and activated the plugin there are a couple of settings you need to tweak before your Sitemap can be built.

But first, we need to create the page for your Sitemap.

To create your Sitemap page, just type into the page title area the name of your Sitemap page, I simply use the term Sitemap, you can add any additinal meta data, keywords ect… but at this stage leave the main content area blank.

Click on the Publish button when finished.

After we have our blank Sitemap page created, it’s time to configure the plugin settings.

To find the settings page for the plugin, look in the left sidebar for a link under the Settings tab with the text DDSitemapGen. Click the link to continue.

The first part of the configuration page is the General Options.

The first couple of options are fairly self explanatory.

Choose the language you want your sitemap to display and the number of items to display on your sitemap page, any new pages will automatically be generated for you.

It’s the third option, Sitemap page slug that I would like to clarify here.

The sitemap page slug is the exact location of the sitemap webpage.

In the image below you can see that my sitemap is located directly after my main websites URL.

Everything between the two /’s is your page slug.

Your slug will always be in lowercase letters and remember, never leave a space when your page has a multiple word title.

The next section, which is the Sitemap Generation settings is basically where you determin how you want to display the content on your sitemap.

This really is a personal preference and as you can see, your choices are very clearly defined and laid out.

In the next section Exclusions, is where you can choose what posts and pages you want to hide from being visible on your sitemap.

My article titled How To Hide Pages In The XML Sitemap will walk you through the process of hiding pages in your sitemap, the only difference here being you have  two text areas, one for posts and the other for pages.

In the Navigation section, you choose how you want the sitmap navigation to be displayed, this is a personal prefference and comes down to what you feel is best for your visitors.

and finally the Miscellaneous section.

In this section you can decide whether or not you want to display a link to your XML sitemap, and where you want the link to your XML Sitemap to be displayed, I personally suggest you add your XML Sitemap in here if you haven’t already included it somewhere in your site.

You also have the option of whether or not you want the links on your Sitemap to open in a new window.

I do not recommend you open internal links in a new window.

There’s a whole debate on forcing links to open a new window, and it’s a fairly contentious one.

If you want to open external links in a new window, that is up to you, but having internal links open in a new window is beyond comprehension.

OK, So now that we have configured and set up our sitemap plugin, we now need to add a lttle peice of code into our sitemap page to get the Sitemap to work.

Click on the Edit link under the Pages section in your Settings sidebar to edit your Sitemap page.

Once your Sitemap page is open you need to paste this code into your page.

`<!– ddsitemapgen –>`

Make sure you paste the code above, into your page with the HTML tab chosen.

Then save your changes by clicking on the Update Page button and your done.

Now go to your new Sitemap page and check out your new User Friendly Sitemap.

More On This Topic...

• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Hide Pages In The XML Sitemap.
• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.

They are not the type of sitemap your websites visitors would find useful for finding content.

Instead of having nice looking, well categorized and laid out hyperlinks, an XML sitemap lists content by it’s URL in order of the date your content was added to your site or when your content was last edited.

Your XML sitemap provides information to the Search engines about the meta-data associated to the content on your site and it’s web-pages.

For example,

• When the content was added to the site.
• When your post or page was last edited.
• and…
• How often the content on the page is likely to be changed and updated.

The XML sitemap will also give the Search engines a good indication of the importance of certain pages on your site.

In a nut shell an XML sitemap informs the search engines on content added to your site and makes it easier for them to spider or crawl through your site indexing your content by it’s relevance and importance.

Having an XML sitemap however, doesn’t automatically mean that your web-pages are going to hit the number one spot in the search results.

There are way too many factors that come into play when it comes to where your content gets ranked, it just means that the search engines are aware of your content, and will display your content when the need and relevance arises.

The four major search engines that support the Sitemap protocol are…

• Google.com.
• Bing.com.
• Yahoo.com.
• and Ask.com.

Since the addition of XML sitemaps you no longer need to manually submit your site to the search engines, although when your first getting your site online, it is a good idea to submit your site to a feed aggregator to help your site initially get indexed.

If you are using Wordpress for your Content Management System, an XML Sitemap can be added to your site by simply installing and configuring a plugin.

Otherwise you can use the sitemap generation tool to Build your XML Site Map online.

More On This Topic...

• What Is A Sitemap?
• What Is A Tag?
• What Is Keyword Research?
• What Is The Browser Address Bar.

It is basically the same concept as an index in a book.

A good quality site-map will provide direct links to all publicly viewable content in a well structured and ordered list.

Common items listed on a site map are usually…

• The websites pages.
• The blog categories.
• The blog posts.
• The blog archives.
• The tags used on the site.
• and the RSS feed for the site.

Depending on the size of the website the site-map can be one page or many.

Sitemaps can benefit both the human or robotic visitors of your site, by robots I am referring to search engines crawling your website for new content to index.

A good practice is to have a link to your sitemap in your main page navigation, making it easy for your visitors to find specific pages without having to search through different categories or archives.

There are two main types of sitemaps your website should have.

1. XML Sitemap.
2. .html or .php sitemap.

An XML sitemap is purely for search engines to spider or crawl your site, whilst the .html or .php sitemap is for your human visitors.

To give you an example of how the two sitemaps are different and why you wouldn’t send your human visitors to your XML sitemap have a look at my XML Sitemap Here.

Then compare that by looking at my PHP sitemap.

More On This Topic...

• What Is An XML Sitemap?
• What Is A Tag?
• What Is Keyword Research?
• What Is The Browser Address Bar.

This tutorial will show you how to stop those pages from showing up in the XML Site-map.

To walk you through the process, I have created a page titled Hide This Page, the page has the ID number of 64 and as you can see in the image below it is listed almost at the very top of my Sitemap.

Your page ID is the number associated to the post or page, not the page title.

Firstly, you need the Google XML Sitemaps plugin set up and activated, and I also recommend the Reveal IDs for WP Admin plugin.

When you first set up your Sitemap, you would of noticed a section in the configuration page called Excluded items, Inside of the Exclude Items section is a text area titled Exclude Posts, this is where you need to insert the ID of the pages you want to hide.

The easiest way to find your page or post ID, is to use the plugin I referred to at the start of the post, which is the Reveal ID’s For WP Admin.

After you have installed, activated and set up your plugins, Go to the edit Posts or Pages screen.

You can find the link to edit your Posts and Pages in the sidebar, for this example I am going to hide a Page, but this same method also works for hiding Posts.

If you have the Reveal ID’s For WP Admin plugin set up and activated, you will see the list of page ID numbers in a single column to the right of screen.

If you don’t have the Reveal ID’s For WP Admin plugin installed, another way to find the page ID is to hover over the page title, and in the footer of your browser is the page ID at the end of the URL for the specific page.

Find the ID number of the specific page/pages you want to hide.

Go back to your Site-map configuration page and insert the page ID’s inside of the Exclude Posts section.

After inserting the page ID followed by a comma, scroll to the bottom of the page and save your changes by clicking on the Update Options button.

Once you have saved your preferences you will need to rebuild your Site-map.

To rebuild the site-map click on the link with the text rebuild the sitemap, at the top of your site-map configuration page.

After saving your changes and rebuilding your site-map, go to your site-map page to confirm that the page has been removed.

Your Site-map can be found by clicking on the link at the top of your configuration page.

Or, by typing into your browsers address bar www.your-domain-name.com/sitemap.xml

Refresh your page to see the changes, you may need to clear your cache or simply open the web page in a new browser.

If all goes well your page should now be hidden from your XML sitemap.

More On This Topic...

• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
• How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Without Using An FTP Client.

Every time you add a new post or edit an older one, your site-map is automatically updated, and all of the major search engines that support the site-map protocol are notified about your updates.

Installing the plugin is very easy, you can upload the plugin to your server using your favorite FTP client or use the Add New plugin feature inside of your wordpress admin area.

If you want to Download the plugin before uploading, you can find it at the Wordpress Resopsitory or you can can Download it directly from the plugin Authors site

If your installing it directly from inside of your Wordpress site, you can find the plugin by doing a keyword search using the  keywords, Google XML Site-maps.

Once your plugin has been installed and activated you will now need to setup the plugin.

You can find the settings for the plugin, under the Settings tab with a link with the text XML-Sitemap. Click on the link to configure the plugin.

The first thing you should do is build your site-map. you will see a link at the very top of your page, this is a very simple exercise just click the link, everything is done Automatically for you.

After the site-map has been built, you will get a Results of the last build process report, If there has been an issue with building your site-map you will see a report similar to the image below.

As you can see from the screen shot above there was an issue notifying Ask.com about the installation of my site-map.

As you continue to look further down the configuration page, you will notice there are a lot of default setting that are pre-checked.

I don’t usually change to much with these settings, but one thing I suggest you do, is add your Yahoo developer ID, you will need to insert your Yahoo ID in the Basic Options section, you can see where to insert this in the image below.

The Additional Pages section is where you add pages that are not part of your Wordpress installation.

The next two sections, Post Priority and Location Of Your Site-map File, I usually leave alone unless of course I have to change the file paths for any specific reason.

The next section, Sitemap Content, I check everything that I want to be indexed by the search engines.

The next section, Exclude Items, is where you can choose what pages you want to exclude from being visible in your site-map.

This can be especially handy if you want to hide specific pages that may have links to downloadable files.

The next section, Change Frequencies is where you decide on how often your pages get indexed or crawled.

This will not guarantee your pages will get crawled, but it tells the spiders what pages or parts of your site are more likely to be updated and which ones won’t.

And finally the Priorities.

This is where you decide on what are the most important parts or sections of your site.

Once you have configured your site-map as to how you would like to present your content to the Search Engine Spiders, make sure you save all of your changes by clicking on the Update Options button at the bottom of the page.

Just one more thing, and this isn’t necessarily a requirement but, it is recommended that you place a link to your site-map from the homepage of your site.

Your sitemap can usually be found at www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

More On This Topic...

• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Install Google Analytics In Wordpress.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• How To Hide Pages In The XML Sitemap.