Continuing our series on helpful WordPress plugins we use and recommend for our clients…

Google XML Sitemaps

Search engines do a great job of finding web-based content on their own. But sometimes they need help, and in recent years they adopted a standardized format that site owners can use to submit sitemaps (lists of pages on a site). The format is called the Sitemap protocol and it basically involves putting an XML file listing a site’s indexable content somewhere on the site where search engines can download and process it. Maintaining this XML file can be a very tedious task to do manually, as the format is quite strict. What’s a blogger to do? Surely not update the sitemap XML file by hand after each post? Enter the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

This little wonder updates your blog’s sitemap file each and every time you publish a new post (unless you wish to update it manually). It not only updates the sitemap file, it also gives Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask a big heads-up that there’s something new to come see. You can tell it to exclude certain categories, tags, or posts from the sitemap and set up simple rules for priority and update frequency. Note: For Yahoo automatic notification, a Yahoo Application ID (similar to a WordPress API Key, discussed in our prior discussion of Akismet) is required (sign up for one here).

Check out the Google Sitemap Generator plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Twitter Widget Pro, a great tool to display your Twitter feed in your blog’s sidebar.