Advantages of adding a sitemap to your Wordpress blog

If you are serious about blogging, you should add a sitemap to your blog. There are many advantages associated with a sitemap. Here are some:

• Search engines will be able to index your blog posts better. Search engines work by jumping from link to link [This is called spidering] and indexing the text [and images] they find on those pages. Sometimes, certain pages may not have many links pointing to them and so they do not get indexed. Using a sitemap will list all those pages in a place and so search engines will have no problem indexing your pages.
• Better navigation for users. Sometimes, if your site or blog is very big, visitors will get “lost” and they will ultimately leave the site and search for something else in Google. If you add a sitemap, they won’t have any difficulty in finding the pages that they are interested in.
• 404 pages. It happens often. If you update the link structure of your blog, all the links will get messed up. If someone visits your pages from external links, all he/she will see is a 404 page. You can customize this and add links to your sitemap or even include the sitemap in the 404 page. This will redirect the visitor to the appropriate page.

So, how to you use a sitemap ? If you use a html based static website, all you have to do is to use an online sitemap generator and create the sitemap. You can then upload the sitemap to your website and link to it from your homepage or other pages. Then, submit it to search engines so that they can index all the pages of your website.

However, if you are using a blogware like wordpress, it can be a bit difficult. That approach won’t work. if you use online sitemap generators, you will have to create the sitemap again and again, each time you update your blog. So, the alternative is to use a sitemap generator plugin.

I recommend: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/

This is one of the best sitemap generator plugins I know. Highly recommended.

Related Reading:

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