Building a sitemap for wordpress

In a previous post regarding SEO,one of my blog reader Ravikant had pointed out that I missed sitemaps. Sitemaps are very essential part of your website. Sitemaps are nothing but a page that links to all the contents/sections of your website.

Why sitemaps ?

Usually when it comes SEO we need to establish a balance both the visitors and the search engine bots. So, sometimes we compromise on design to make it search engine friendly or sometimes we need such designs for our users to make them comfortable on the website at the cost of search engine. So a perfect balance must be maintained as both search engine and visitors matters to us the most. But fortunately with sitemap it serves both i.e. the visitors and search engine perfectly.

• It helps the user to understand your website navigation structure.If he gets lost,he can follow the sitemap to browse through the website.
• It helps the search engine by listing all the links on a single page, this way it becomes easier for the search engine to index our pages by visiting these links.

After having a sitemap on your blog you will find out that users are staying on your blog for a longer duration by reading more contents. The chances of your website being bookmarked increases, because when he see’s the sitemap he finds many new articles and contents which he never knew existed. Not many of the visitors will explore through your monthly archive. Sitemap provides a shorter and a quicker way to explore the site contents.

With search engine you will give it an opportunity to explorer and index the pages which it could not index for some reason, simple reason being it never found it. The ultimate goal of SEO is to get maximum pages of your website indexed by the search engine.

Installing sitemaps

I found this really interesting wordpress plugin that automatically generates the sitemap as your keep on updating your blog. You can find this plugin here. You can see my site’s sitemap here.

This is from there website

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Upload the plugin to your wordpress plugin directory and activate the plugin in your admin panel. Once that is done go to options>sitemap plugin and set your preferences. If you are using permalink enter the text as sitemap.

Go to create new page select code and insert <!– ddsitemapgen –> into the page and give the page title as sitemap and save the page. You can find more insturctions on installation of this plugin at authors website.