If you host a wordpress site on your own web host (not on here), there is a great plugin you can get to generate both a Google sitemap and a standard xml sitemap. (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/). The plugin allows you to customize the sitemap generation, automatically updates the sitemap when you publish a new post, and informs the magor search engines of the changes.
I had a basic static html website that I converted over to a wordpress site. Before, I made the change, 4 of the 5 pages where indexed on Google. After the change, only one was indexed (the home page), and of course, the site fell off the PR radar for certain keyword searches. After installing and activating this plugin, immediately 5 pages where indexed, a day later 6 where indexed, and now a total of 9 are. It really is a great tool, but I heard some people have some issues with the instruction, specifically step 2 which discusses setting permissions using CHMOD commands, and using your ftp client to make those changes. The instructions where written for users on various OS platforms and using various applications for web publishing so they kind of cover all the bases.
If you are using windows and use an ftp client associated with your web host like Godaddy for example, it really is very easy and I outlined the instructions below. Fill free to ask if you have any problems
1. Download the file at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/goog…
2. Unzip the file to your desktop
3. Open up notepad
4. Save the blank document as sitemap.xml to your desktop
5. Save it again as sitemap.xml.gz
6. Login to your godaddy (or other host) account online and go to the ftp client
7. Upload the unzipped folder to your plugins folder
8. Upload both sitemap.xml and the sitemap.xml.gz files to your main directory (the one that contains the wp-config.php file)
9. Login to your sites dashboard, navigate to Plugins, and activate the new plugin.
10. Go to dashboard>>options and select xml-sitemap
11. At the top it should say ‘create your sitemap for the 1st time’ or something like that.
12. Select that option and you will see that it creates your sitemaps and notifies the search engines.
Your done! You can change the various properties of the sitemaps if you want. I leave it at default except i added categories as one of the fields.
Need help with your WordPress site?
I have issues with this plugin, I do everything it explains and have my read/write permissions set but I still get these errors
-There was a problem writing your sitemap file. Make sure the file exists and is writable.
-There was a problem writing your zipped sitemap file. Make sure the file exists and is writable.
Maybe this doesn’t work for windows server?