A sitemap should be the basis of the entire website. Search engines orient themselves according to it and ensure better and faster indexing of pages. If you’re using an SEO extension, it probably already has a sitemap feature. However, the plugin, which you will read about in this article, also has a lot of goodies. One of them concerns the search engines Google and Bing – after each update or creation of a post, the mentioned search engines are informed about the changes, which speeds up the aforementioned indexing and subsequent display in the search results.
Installing and activating the plugin
Install the plugin from the given address and activate it. Then, in the left menu of the administration, click on Settings -> XML-Sitemap.
Adding sitemap to robots.txt
If your website does not have a robots.txt file in the root folder of the website, then the link to the sitemap will be automatically added to this file using the native functions of WordPress. It’s possible that for some reason you have a manually created robots.txt file. In that case, add a line to it with a link to the mentioned sitemap. This is located at the URL address that you can find at the very top of the plugin settings.
Basic settings
The authors of the plugin have perfectly fine-tuned the default settings, so in my opinion there is no need to change anything noticeably. I’ll just walk you through a few things that make sense to set up.
Manually adding pages to the sitemap ( Additional Pages section ) – this can be useful if you need to get some pages into the sitemap that you have not created directly at the WordPress level.
The number of comments is used to calculate post priority. More commented posts therefore have a higher priority and are indexed more often. You can change this in the Post Priority section.
In the Content section of the sitemap, you can enable the addition of links to sections, archives, author pages qatar phone number data and tags. By default, these options are turned off, and I recommend leaving it that way. However, you can turn it on if for some reason you want to send a link to these pages to search engines.
You can exclude certain categories or posts/pages in the Excluded Items section. For example, if you don’t want to have a post in the sitemap that refers to a time-limited event.
Change Frequencies are the average how I do in-house consulting working with client teams estimated times how often the content of certain parts of your website changes. Search engines may or may not take this into account. I would cz lists leave the recommended settings.
You can adjust the priorities , but the default makes sense to me as well.