Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

The Google XML Site-map plugin will create a Google compliant XML-Site-map for your WordPress site, although the sitemap produced is not the prettiest sitemap you will ever see, it’s more for search engines rather than people, this plugin is an essential addition to any Wordpress website.

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

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