A sitemap s a graphical representation of the structural and hierarchical linkage of a web site. So why would you want to add a sitemap to your site? There are many reasons:

1. Search Engine Optimisation - A sitemap will create a file that is a representation of very article, post, menu etc on your site.  This is very important to allow search engines to crawl and index your site
2. Ease of Navigation - A sitemap will allow users to see a hierarchical representation of your site which means they can browse it with more ease.  Some people prefer to do this and you have to cater for everyone to have a successful site
3. Theme and content of site - a sitemap allows the user to quickly assess the site’s, content and suitability quickly therefore saving them time.  This is key on a website. No one wants to spend ages scouring through pages of information.
4. The Wemaster – a sitemap will allow the webmaster to structure the site for ease of use and evaluate the overall content of the site.

Adding a sitemap to your wordpress site

We have tried a couple of plugins and have found Google XML Sitemaps to be the best and easiest to use.

• You can download it here.
• Once you have downloaded it extract the folder and upload it to your site’s /wp-content/plugins/ folder using your preferred Ftp Client.
• When you have done this create 2 files – you can easily do this by right clicking on your desktop and clicking ‘New’ and then ‘Test Document’ – do this twice and then rename the 1st file sitemap.xml and the 2nd sitemap.xml.gz
• Upload these 2 files to your WordPress folder – this is where you will find the wp-config.php file
• Make the 2 files writeable by changing their attributes (CHMOD) to 666
• Go into the admin of your site and activate the plugin
• Next go to Google Webmasters, add your site and verify it – click here if you need to learn how to do this stage
• Then you can add your sitemap by clicking ‘site configurations’ then sitemaps’ – check webmaster again in 10 minutes and it will tell you if you have been successful. You can also check it by going to your browser and typing in your domain name with /sitemap.xml on the end.

Errors

If you get this error:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: /sitemap.xml
Line Number 1, Column 1:

You can fix it by deactivating the sitemap plugin, deleting the sitemap files from the website (using Ftp again) and deleting the error_log file also. Then reactivate the plugin and manually rebuild sitemap.

That’s you done!