What is XML Sitemap and why you need it on your blog

XML sitemap is an easy way for a blogger to inform search engines about blog pages and blog posts on his/her blog site that are available for crawling.

In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URL’s for a blog site along with additional metadata about each blog URL. Information like when the blog post was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other blog URL’s on the blog. This way search engines can more intelligently crawl the blog site.

Web crawlers usually discover blog pages from links within the blog site and from other online sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all blog URL’s in the Sitemap and learn about those URL’s using the associated blog metadata.

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that blog posts and blog pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your blog site.

The easiest way of implementing a XML Sitemap on your blog is to use Google XML Sitemap Generator free WordPress blog plugin. The blog plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog in format that is supported by Google, Yahoo and other search engines.