How to Install The Google Sitemaps Plugin in a WordPress Blog

Contributor

By Heather U.
eHow Contributing Writer

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(2 Ratings)

Wordpress developers and users have created a host of plugins for your blog. The Google XML Sitemap plugin is a way for bloggers or web masters to let search engines know about all their pages on a website. An XML file tells the engine information such as how often there are changes, which sites are similar and other metadata. Search engines find out about sites through web crawlers. A sitemap helps to make this process a little smoother, more accurate or even faster.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Wordpress blog
Site host

Step 1

Download the Google Sitemap plugin to your computer. You can find the link for this in the Resources section below, or just search for the Google Sitemap plugin on the WordPress plugin page.
Step 2

Sign onto your web host. This will vary from user to user. If you use free WordPress and not a host, you cannot use plugins.
Step 3

Find wp-content/plugins directory on your hosting site. Upload the zip file (google-sitemap-generator.3.1.0.1.zip or higher) to the plugins folder.
Step 4

Extract the zipped files.
Step 5

Make two different files (named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz) and upload via FTP to your directory. The directory is usually called wp-config.php. Althought you do not want your whole site to be writable, you do want these two new files to be writable via CHMOD 666.
Step 6

Go into your plugins on WordPress and activate the newly added sitemap.

Tips & Warnings

WordPress has several preferred hosts to choose from. If you are new to blogging, you may want to go with one of their suggestions because they have been optimized for WordPress and managing your account can therefore be easier.
You cannot install plugins if you use the free version of WordPress.

Resources