How To Install The Google XML Sitemap Plugin
ByIn this tutorial I will teach you how to install the Google XML sitemap plugin on your wordpress blog.
Having a sitemap for your blog is important because it makes it easier for search engines spider and index the pages and posts of your wordpress blog.
Even though the plugin uses the Google name, the sitemap will be used by all search engines e.g. Yahoo, Bing and Ask.
A sitemap is an xml page of links to all the pages and posts on your blog here is the sitemap for Your Blog Builder.
Step One
Make sure your blog is visible to everyone including search engines. This is a very important setting, if your blog is set to block search engines then it will not be indexed by search engines meaning no free search engine traffic 
.
To check this click the settings tab in the admin area of your blog then click privacy:
You will now see 2 options make sure I would like my blog to be visible to everyone is selected:
I would only suggest blocking search engines if you are using wordpress for a private membership area.
Step Two
Download and unzip the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
FTP the google-sitemap-generator folder to the wp-content/plugins folder in your hosting account.
If you need a more detailed tutorial of how to download/ unzip and ftp a plugin read my How To Install A Wordpress Plugin Tutorial.
Step Three
Go to the plugin page in your wordpress dashboard. Activate the Google XML sitemap plugin:
You now need to build the sitemap.
To do this click the link on the configuration page to build the sitemap:
If the sitemap generated successfully you should now see a report like this:
If you click the sitemap link you should now see your sitemap or if you visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or if your blog is installed in a sub directory such as blog it will be yourdomain.com/blog/sitemap.xml (replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name).
The only issue I have come across is permission problems so you may need to create your own blank sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files. You will need to make those files writable so once you have uploaded those files set the permissions to something like 666.
Congratulations you have successfully installed the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
Tools used in this wordpress tutorial:
