There are only a couple of plugins out there for automatic sitemap generation on WordPress, that really serves the purpose. While generating a sitemap is not that all a big deal, setting it right with the right options does make a nig difference to your SEO scores. Not everyone is aware of the right settings for a sitemap, many still thinks that adding a sitemap is enough to take care of things.

Let me try and explain to you what could be possibly the right settings for generating a sitemap for your WordPress blog, and why its essential.

Today among all the sitemap generator plugins for WordPress we have, the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Plugin is the best one available (For HTML sitemaps), because it has more control over sitemap generation and it helps us to trim down the sitemap to an effective one devoid of the frills. And Google Sitemap Generator by Arne Brachchold for XML sitemaps.

Some things to keep in mind before generating a sitemap

- A sitemap is like a route-map to the search bots. It doesn’t mean that you have to put in everything that you have on your website on a sitemap.
- Search bots will find links to your pages and will anyway crawl them, even without a sitemap (sometimes), so when you have a sitemap, make sure you add some value to it by adding in some additional info.
- Sitemap doesn’t mean a huge set of links on an HTML page, its an XML file often found at the root folder.
- Once you have a sitemap, make sure you let the crawlers know about it, either through the Webmaster console or the Robots.txt.
- Not listing a post/article on the sitemap will not make the crawlers stay away from it.

Making the right settings for the Google WordPress sitemap plugin

Here is an example of optimum setting for the Google sitemap generator.

1. Uncheck the – Add sitemap URL to robots.txt

If this is checked, the plugin will rewrite your existing robots.txt or create problems with it if its already existing. Uncheck this and add the following syntax to your Robots.txt

Sitemap: http://www.yourblogurlhere.com/sitemap.xml

2. Always check the template URL.

The sitemap generator follows a template which is by default in the plugin directory. If you have made changes to the plugin directory name/moved it, this will not function properly. So while checking the “default” option, make sure the path is right, or else you will get a broken sitemap.

3. Uncheck the MySQL standard mode unless absolutely necessary

This if checked will take a lot of memory on your server, so uncheck it unless you have MySQL errors showing up on the sitemap.

4. Limit the number of posts in sitemap

The maximum number of files that can be listed on a sitemap is 50,000 beyond which you have to split up the sitemap and use a “mother sitemap” to link to the “satellite sitemaps”. So unless you have a very large website with lots of pages (above 50k), leave it as such.

5. In Building mode, check rebuild sitemap, if you make changes to the contents of your blog

This will ensure that every time you post/edit a new article, a new sitemap will be generated.

Location of the Sitemap file and Post Priorities

As seen in the above image, check the “Do not use automatic priority calculation”. We will give the priorities for the sitemap contents in the next step.

Also, the location for the sitemap should be the root folder ex:- yourblog.com/sitemap.xml

Click on automatic detection and give the file name as “sitemap.xml”. Using a custom location will complicate things.

Setting Content Priorities for the Sitemap

In the priorities box, set the maximum priority for homepage > followed by posts and pages > then equal priority for all other contents like category and tags.

1 means high priority and lesser values lesser priorities.

Having a higher priority will suggest the crawlers to index those files more often with more importance. However this might get over ridden by incoming link value.

Setting crawling Frequencies for the sitemap contents

In the change frequencies box, make sure that all the values are according to your normal change rates. If you have a weekly posting cycle, change the posts to “Weekly” and if you have a daily cycle, change it to “Daily”. The idea is to give a hint to the search crawlers as to when the content on the site will be changed and what will be changed frequently. But this too will be overridden by the crawlers own judgement, so this setting is only a hint.

That should wrap up some basic sitemap settings, make sure you check your sitemap is fully working and not broken. If it is, the first thing to do is change the settings back to default and rebuild the sitemap.