Google SiteMap Generator For WordPress

Q: What is the best blog software out there?

A: WordPress!

I have been using WordPress for maybe about 8+ years now, and have found it to be the very best blog software available.

A number of my own sites, including my blog at RavisRants.com is powered by WordPress.

Yes, there are others that might get a mention when you talk about “content management applications”.

But when it comes to the community support, number of plugins and themes available, extensibility and ease of customization, WordPress beats them all hands-down.

So I wanted to tell you about a PHP-based Sitemap Generation tool for WordPress that I use myself, to generate the sitemap.xml for my
WordPress blogs.

The installation is very simple:  Just upload the PHP script to the plugins folder, activate it through the admin control panel (“plugins”), and then through “Options > SiteMap” link, you can either generate the  sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz (gzip file) on demand, if not, the script will generate it for you everytime you add, edit or delete a blog post.

Very simple to install and works like a charm.

The script can also automatically notify Google of the change to your sitemap.

However, I still recommend that you first sign-up for a Google Webmaster account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Add your site, verify that you’re the owner by uploading a file (you’ll see how), and then once  you’ve updated the sitemap on your site using the script mentioned above, log in to your
webmaster account, select the web site for which you just updated the sitemap, “check” the sitemap for that site and then click on “Resubmit Selected”.

That will instruct Google’s robots to come spidering your sitemap.

You can download the Free WordPress plugin at:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

Ravi Jayagopal