Search Engines like Google need to know the web pages that you have created and submitted so that they can be included in the search results for the users. Through the normal crawling process, the Search Engines may not be able to discover all the web pages on your site. So to make sure that a search engine knows all the pages on your site, you require creating and submitting Sitemap.
A Sitemap reveals the structure of your website. In simple terms, sitemap depicts the list of web pages on your site. Using WordPress Sitemap Plugins you can create and post Sitemap (also called XML Sitemap) for your website.
Here, we have compiled a list of Best Free WordPress Sitemap Plugins that you can install and use on your WordPress website or blog for generating Sitemap file.
Using a sitemap for your website, you can ensure that all of your website pages or posts are crawled and indexed by search engines. Moreover, the newly added posts or pages are indexed quickly and also the web pages, which are updated are crawled by search engines. Having Sitemap is particularly useful when your website is new and has few backlinks; your website depicts dynamic content, or your website has a large archive of content which are not well linked to each other, etc.
You can generate Sitemap for various types of content on your website such as blogs (written content), images, videos, news, and mobile. In the ongoing post of Best Free WordPress Sitemap Plugins, we have showcased various types of Sitemap Plugins including, Image Sitemap Plugin, Video Sitemap Plugin, XML Sitemap Plugin, Mobile Sitemap Plugin, etc.
A Sitemap entry specifies a lot of things. For example in a Video Sitemap, an entry specifies the video URL, the running time of your video, its category, family-friendly status, etc.
So you can go through the ongoing post of Best Free WordPress Sitemap Plugins, and we are quite hopeful that you would get to have a suitable Sitemap Plugin for your WordPress site or blog.
Must Have WordPress Sitemap Plugins
1. Google XML Sitemaps
With Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin you can create XML sitemap for your blog pages or posts which enables the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to index blogs in a much better way. This informs the search engines about a website’s URLs that can be crawled. Google XML Sitemaps actually creates a XML file which lists down a site’s URLs. It enables a search engine to crawl a site more intelligently.
Google XML Sitemaps Plugin helps the search engines crawlers to view the whole structure of a site and makes retrieving much easy and efficient. It supports custom URLs as well as different kinds of pages generated by WordPress. It even notifies search engines when you happen to create a new post with content.
2. Google XML Sitemap for Images
The Google XML Sitemap for Images Plugin helps to generate XML sitemap of your WordPress powered blog together with all the image URLs that are attached with the WordPress blog posts and pages. It helps the search engines to better index the image URLs in your website posts or pages. This makes the retrieving of the image URLs in your WordPress blog more efficient. Google XML Sitemap for Images Plugin informs the search engines that your website has image URLs and makes crawling much easier and efficient.
3. Google XML Sitemap for Videos
Sometimes you happen to include videos in your WordPress blog posts or pages. You may even run exclusive video sites. Then in that case, you can use Google XML Sitemap for Videos WordPress Plugin to tell the search engines that you are using video content in your website. This Video Sitemap Plugin generates XML Video Sitemaps for your blog using all the video files that you have included in your blog pages or posts. The Video Sitemap generated by this Plugin will depict the web pages which happen to embed videos in them. The videos can be from YouTube or can have links to videos.
4. WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the most highly rated plugin for accomplishing WordPress SEO tasks. You can further enhance the WordPress platform for SEO by using this powerful plugin known as WordPress SEO by Yoast. It primarily helps you to write better content by focusing keyword in your article and then using the focus keyword at various places such as in the title, description, headings and even in the content. Apart from this WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin can generate XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog posts or pages. It also includes the images that you have used in your posts or pages so that search engines may index them too.
5. Google XML Sitemap for Mobile
Using this WordPress Sitemap Plugin you are able to generate XML Mobile Sitemap for your blog on WordPress. So if you are not using Responsive Design for your website, you can use Google XML Sitemap for Mobile Plugin to generate Mobile Sitemap which serves mobile screens. The Sitemap generated by this Plugin will include URLs which serve web content on mobile.
Hope you liked these WordPress Sitemap Plugins and you may have using these plugin. Please share your favorite WordPress Sitemap Plugins.
I like the Google XML Sitemaps because its easy to use. It gave me errors when it was first activated (couldn’t create the 2 files). So what I did was to create on my computer these two empty files: sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz
I copied them to my web server and changed the permissions to 777 for both files. After that I clicked on “rebuild the sitemap manually” and everything was fine.