A Sitemap? What is that? Well it seems that you didn’t read paragraphs 3 and 4 of my article Basic Errors I See In Other Blogs. A sitemap is a file which indicates to the spiderbot all the pages (well depends on how updated the sitemap is) that compose your blog or website. Thus the robot does not have to follow all the internal links it finds on your blog to index your pages. With the sitemap the robot gets all the information faster. Remember that every article you wrote in your blog is a page. Using a sitemap is highly recommended by the search engines.

If you use WordPress you’re lucky because there is a plugin that do it all for you. This plugin is the Google Sitemaps Generator. The installation instructions are the same as for any other plugin, but beware that the plugin creates sitemap in the base directory of your blog so you should give the right privileges to write in it.

Once you have installed the plugin a new tab appears in the settings menu, XML-Sitemap. The options listed by default (I think) are most recommended. I checked Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog for which you need an Application ID but don’t worry because it is free and you can ask for one clicking on the link that appear below the box where you have to write the ID.

In Sitemap Content I checked only the following options to avoid creating too unnecessarily duplicate content:

1. Homepage.
2. Posts.
3. Static pages.

If you have a robot.txt file you have to indicate in it where is the sitemap, add the line

Sitemap: http://www.tusitio.com/sitemap.xml.gz

This file ends with .xml.gz because it is compressed to take up less disk space. If you don’t have one mark the option Modify or create robots.txt file… so the plugin will create one automatically. Basically it contains the location of the sitemap.

As I told you the default options are the recommended, without getting into too much complication. Once finished with preferences at the top you have a link whick says “Build sitemap.” By clicking on it the file sitemap.xml is generated. If you find some problem probably is that you didn’t apply the correct privileges on the base directory. That’s all :D, from now this plugin will update your sitemap.xml file every time you write or update an article.

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