Does Your WordPress Blog Have a Sitemap.xml File?
A sitemap is a file that allows for search engines to quickly and easily find newly published content on your web site or blog. The sitemap.xml file has been widely adopted as the industry standard among popular search engines including, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.
If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, creating and maintaining a sitemap can’t be made easier. Arne Brachhold has provided the WordPress community with a wonderful WordPress Plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin is great because it does everything for you automatically. You don’t need to worry about having to learn how to make your own sitemap.xml file, which quite honestly can be very complicated to create and very difficult to maintain.
Once installed, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will create a Google compliant XML sitemap and even create a proper robots.txt file which will direct the Googlebot to your sitemap so that it can quickly and easily find your newly published content and also easily check for updates on your existing posts.
In addition to being Goole compliant, The Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin is also compliant with Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Installing this plugin couldn’t be made any easier and the process involved in to different than installing any other standard WordPress plugin.
Some of the features included with this plugin is as follows: