Maintaining an up-to-date sitemap for your website is a good practice from an SEO and usability perspective. If your website or blog is based on WordPress, there are many handy plugins that enable you to maintain an automatically updating XML sitemap. To help you choose from some of the best plugins for maintaining an XML sitemap, following are some handy choices.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin generates an XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog. A sitemap is an easy way for crawlers to access URLs on your site and to go through the complete website architecture. Thus by maintaining an XML sitemap, you can provide an easier way for crawlers to retrieve links on your site more efficiently. With support for all kinds of WordPress generated pages, Google XML Sitemaps is a great way to maintain a sitemap for your website or blog based on WordPress CMS. Additionally, this plugin notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post.
As the sitemap is updated automatically, one need not manually edit and update links – which can be tedious. Thus, to de-clutter your sitemap and maintain it effectively, Google XML Sitemaps is a feasible solution.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
This plugin creates a XML sitemap for your WordPress powered blog or website. From its own options page, this plugin is highly customizable via the WordPress admin panel. Some of its key features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.
WP Realtime Sitemap
This plugin makes it easier for your to show pages, posts, tags and, categories as a sitemap without having to make modifications to your template or code in HML / PHP. Hierarchical listing of pages and categories, option to reorder links in the sitemap, WordPress shortcode support to include the sitemap within pages and posts are some of its key features.
WP Shopping Cart XML Sitemap
This plugin automatically adds products and categories from the WP E-Commerce plugin to your XML sitemap, thereby enabling search engines to discover your online shop in an effective way.
Google XML Sitemap for Videos
This WordPress plugin enables you to generate Google Video Sitemaps (XML) using all YouTube videos that you may have embedded in your blog posts. Your Video Sitemap will include web pages with videos embedded from YouTube or which links to videos on YouTube.
