How to Create a WordPress Sitemap for Your Site

Installing a WordPress Sitemap onto your blog is a great way to make it easier for visitors to find previous posts. Not only that, but a sitemap will make it easier for the search engines to find and index all of the pages on your site.

What is a wordpress sitemap? A sitemap is basically a page that lists every other page or post on your entire site. There are 2 types of sitemap: html and xml. A html sitemap is more for site visitors to find for previous posts/pages and will have it’s own page. An xml sitemap is an xml file that will help the search engine spiders to crawl your site more thoroughly.

Ok so let’s create a html sitemap. The first thing you want to do is install the “Dagon Design Sitemap Generator”. To do this log into you wordpress blog’s dashboard. Scroll down to “plugins” and click on “Add New”

Next search for “dagon design sitemap”. Make sure it’s the one by “Dagon Design” and click on Install and then activate it.

Once you’ve activated it scroll down to your WordPress’ “Settings” tab and then click on DDSitemapGen. The settings are usually fine out of the box, but you may want to change some of them to suit your blog.

The only setting that I’ve changed is to show pages first, rather than posts first. I have also added the location of my XML Sitemap next to “Full path to XML sitemap:”. Once you’ve chosen your settings click the “update options” button.

Now for the final step. Create a new page for your sitemap to go and put this piece of code where you would like the sitemap to display: <!– ddsitemapgen –>
Make sure the page editor is set to html when you paste the code it.

And your done! You’ve now got a professional wordpress sitemap with the click of a few buttons. In the next article I  cover how to install a Wordpress XML Sitemap to make your blog more search engine friendly.