Having an up to date sitemap is crucial for your website or blog. It helps crawlers find your pages and content, ranking them accordingly. In the case of WordPress making a sitemap is easy and of course it involves a plugin.

The plugin is Google XML sitemaps. The use is very simple, install it and it automatically creates a sitemap. To make the most of this you need a Google webmasters account for your website. From here getting crawled and added to Google is actually a less complex matter than you’d expect.

You can of course modify some settings for Google XML sitemaps if you know what you’re doing and what your sitemap done different. I believe the only changes I made to the settings was including the tag pages in sitemap content. I also leave Do not use automatic priority calculation selected, As I want Google to testify and judge my content on what is my best work. I don’t want to favour a post that isn’t SEO sound or that Google has a hard time ranking, post quality and let it do the work automatically.

To test that your websites sitemap was created type in its domain name followed by /sitemap.xml in a web browser and it should load up a strange webpage mostly with links. It pays to also occasionally submit your sitemap url to Google in Google webmasters to quicken the crawl process up.

Google XML sitemaps is a must have plugin in my opinion for WordPress, its simple and does its job without being a clutter and freemium. Install it today and be on the path to well ranking content.