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An important part of Search Engine optimization is having a site. A sitemap is a page of pages on a website. The pages are designed to make is easy for the web crawlers to find all of your content. Usually sitemaps are setup to be hierarchical. Being setup in this fashion not only helps the search engine bots but, it helps visitors navigate those harder to reach pages on your site. Image source: Free DelliOS System Icons!

Sitemaps for WordPress

Anyone who runs a WordPress Blog knows that there is not a built in sitemap. If a WordPress user wanted to add a sitemap to their blog they would have to manually create on themselves and submit to the search engines or the other alternative is to use a sitemap plugin that is designed to automatically create an XML file and submit it to all of the major search engines for you. On Evolutionary Designs, we use Google (XML) for WordPress to automatically create, update and submit the sitemap. This plugin works great and is easy to install and configure. But, it does not provide a visual sitemap for the readers, the sitemap that is created is only for the search engines.

To install Google (XML) Sitemaps, you will need to follow the these steps,

1. Admin Panel >> install new Plugins>> Search for and install the Plugin
2. Activate Plugin
3. Configure the plugin using the XML Sitemap Link

After setting up this plugin, I decided I wanted to have a visual site map added to the site, but at the time I installed the XML plugin, there was not a visual sitemap plugin that I could find for Evolutionary Designs. I decided not to put one manually since it would take a lot time to get the sitemap created and update it whenever I made changes to the site. Visual sitemaps are important, but since I at least had one for the search engines I was to concerned about not having a visual one.

Visual Site Maps for WordPress

A few weeks ago I came across Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress for WordPress Plugin. This plugin is a visual sitemap and works great. This sitemap generator is different from the rest of the sitemap plugins because its considered a true sitemap generator that is highly customizable, the plugin supports multi-level categories, pages, category/page exclusion, multi-page generation with navigation, permalink support, and much more. The plugin is also very easy to install and only takes a few minutes to setup and configure. Take a look at what mine looks like.

To install Dogon Site Map Generator, all you need to do is

1. Admin Panel >> install new Plugins>. Search for and install the Plugin
2. Activate the plugin
3. Configure the plugin under DDSitemapGen link
4. Then create a new page and add <!– ddsitemapgen –> to the page where you want the sitemap to appear.

Conclusion

So far, I like both sitemap plugins and I have no issues running both of them at the same time. In fact, there is even a configuration setting in the Dagon plugin that will link to your XML file if you know where your XML sitemap is stored. Both plugins are easy to install and configure and they are up in running in a mater of minutes.

So are you using these plugins? Are you using them both at the same time? Tell us how well they work for you.