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I wanted a sitemap on our Tucson Real Estate blog. I went looking on the WordPress plugin section site. I found Dagon Design sitemap plugin easy to install and configure and it does exactly what I wanted it to do. You can see it at work on the Sitemap page in the right navigation.
Here are the simple steps to putting a sitemap on your WordPress blog.
Installation
- Download dd-sitemap-gen.txt and rename it to dd-sitemap-gen.php
- Upload the file to the plugins folder of your WordPress installation
- Activate the plugin in your Plugins administration panel
- Configure the plugin in the Options panel (under DDSitemapGen)
- Create a New Page, Title: Sitemap, place the code below on the page using the HTML* window and save:
*Note: For Wordpress 2.0 users who are using the new rich-text editor - be sure to click the ‘html’ button to edit the page source directly. Otherwise Wordpress will wrap code tags around the line which generates the sitemap and it will not work.
You can actually put that code anywhere and it will generate the sitemap, but if you want to keep it simple and not have to add this code whenever you change a theme this is the way I suggest you do it.
I would also suggest you set the options for pages to 0 so it will display on a single page. There are some SEO reasons for this.
I also turned off the option to display a post only in the first category. I want people to be able to find a post in any of the categories associated with that post.
You will notice you can’t swipe and copy the code above. It is a graphic since I don’t know how to display PHP code in a post.
Any help out there on code display in a post would be greatly appreciated.
Stumble it!
11 responses so far ↓
1 Maureen Francis (23 comments.) // Jan 12, 2007 at 7:01 am
Love it, love it, love it.
Thanks Dave. I had never been able to configure the last site map plug in I tried, and I gave up.
2 Dave Smith (31 comments.) // Jan 12, 2007 at 7:18 am
Maureen,
Happy New Year. You are so welcome. I really like this sitemap plug in.
3 Tibor Boros // Nov 25, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Dave,
You can code special characters (google for conversion tables for details). In our case you can write:
<!–ddsitemapgen–>
and it appears:
<!–ddsitemapgen–>
I have done everything as you wrote, but isn’t working. How should I be so silly?
I’ve got a button for Sitemap, but pressing it the page is still empty.
4 Tibor Boros // Nov 25, 2007 at 3:43 pm
typo
<!– ddsitemapgen –>
<!– ddsitemapgen –>
5 ken winston caine (1 comments.) // Jan 6, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Tibor, you’ve probably figured this out. Same thing happened to me.
Although I THOUGHT I had inserted the code, , in a code screen, it turns out I did not. I discovered that by looking at the page’s source code.
So I went back to the post, in edit mode, and removed the existing and then switched (again, I thought) to “code” mode instead of “visual” (which is rich text) and …voila… this time it took… And a site map was generated.
Hope that helps someone.
Best,
kwc
6 John (1 comments.) // Feb 26, 2008 at 1:41 am
Ken,
Thank YOU!! Your advice helped a lot. I was searching for the solution for an hour till I came across your post. Sitemaps works great now!!
7 Drexel Hill, Pa Real Estate (7 comments.) // Feb 26, 2008 at 4:35 am
WOW! I want to say so much. On the sitemap thingy. I don’t agree with just one page. Its a fact google doesn’t want more than 100 links per page. I would select that option for the phugin.
I love the clean look of your site.
I did a big Case Study for the House For Sale Video you may want to look at. Very interesting ideas.
I am setting this site on my favorites as a regular read.
8 Dave Smith (445 comments.) // Feb 26, 2008 at 8:34 am
It isn’t that Google doesn’t want more than 100 links. It just doesn’t spider after 100 links. And that includes all the links in your post, navigation, etc. However, If you check your internal links according to Google it never stops at 100. So they do spider more than 100 links on a page.
9 Drexel Hill, Pa Real Estate (7 comments.) // Feb 26, 2008 at 8:42 am
Great! Thanks for that. Your saying the bot comes and looks at all the links, but doesn’t FOLLOW after 100. This is important to me because I have sitemap in xxx.com/blog/sitemap.html. Since I have index page without a proper sitemap on blog I would loose articles being two clicks from home page. need google to follow all of sitemap.
Thanks again for spreading your knowledge.
10 Dave Smith (445 comments.) // Feb 26, 2008 at 11:27 am
The best thing to do is have the google sitemap plugin installed. They will automatically generate a sitemap.xml file. This is the best way to feed your site to Google. Doing this and submitting it after you publish a post will eliminate any dependance on the bots crawling your site.
I would never depend on bots crawling the site. Pushing the links through the sitemap.xml is not limited to 100 links like it is when the site is crawled per page. By pushing the sitemap.xml file to google it is a doc and not a page subject to the 100 link limit. The bots crawling the site is just what they do, but in order for you to take control generate a valid sitemap.xml and tell google when you have added content to the file.
11 Drexel Hill, Pa Real Estate (7 comments.) // Feb 26, 2008 at 11:39 am
Thanks so much!
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