How To Create Google XML Sitemaps For Your WordPress Website

Sitemaps are an important element for any website developed on any platform. In WordPress, a blog also needs a sitemap to index it in the search engine. The sitemap helps the search engine crawlers to find the various contents and sublinks of your website and index you on the search engine accordingly.

Therefore, if you want to increase the traffic and visibility of your blog, you must generate a sitemap and submit it via Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster tools for indexing and ranking in their respective search engines. For WordPress, there is a convenience of sitemaps being generated by different plugins. Therefore, Google XML Sitemap is a special plugin available in WP that creates XML sitemaps in accordance with Google search engine. The sitemap generator will also help in generating sitemaps which will also be validated by other search platforms.

Why Google XML Sitemap plugin?

Here are some reasons why Google XML sitemap is the best plugin to generate WordPress sitemaps-

• A simple user interfaces for all functions.
• Availability in different languages.
• Sitemaps are generated automatically for all WordPress pages on the website.
• It calculates the response and the position of the post based on its viewership and comments.
• It notifies to different search engines regarding an update or change in the blog/site.
• It can filter out plugins for which sitemaps can be generated.

Google XML sitemaps plugin to Create WordPress sitemap

1. Google XML sitemap plugin can be installed on a website by two different methods. If your WP site has Yoast SEO, it comes with an integrated Google XML sitemap generator that can be activated from the option.
2. If Yoast is not integrated, simply log in to your WordPress admin panel and search for ‘Google XML Sitemap’ in the plugin sections. After the plugin is found, install it in your panel.
3. After the installation is over, click on Activate and then the plugin is ready to be used for your WordPress site.
4. To configure the sitemap generator, you can go to settings and select XML-Sitemap in your Admin Panel.
5. You can then select the search engines where you want to index by selecting them from the Basic options.
6. You can then select the content for which the sitemap is to be generated in your website by accessing under Sitemap Content.
7. After all the settings are checked, you can select the update option and the plugin will work accordingly.

After creation of the sitemap, it is advisable to submit the sitemap to the Google Webmaster tools & Bing webmaster for search engines.

After each update, the sites are notified on their own. Moreover, you must link all the segments from footer to the sitemap page in order to get the benefit of proper indexing of links.