Search engine optimization is really important for any blog or website because a good optimized blog will get loads of traffic from search engines and it can count up to 60-70% of your total traffic. Having Site map for a blog is one of the important part of Search Engine optimization as Site Maps allow search engines to reach all the content of your blog with ease and thus benefits in better placement in the search engines.

WordPress doesn’t generate Site Map on it’s own, although I would love to see that feature included with it. There are plugins which can generate Site Map for you else there are simple tricks through which we can Generate a Site Map.

WordPress Plugins to Help Generate the Sitemap:

1. Google (XML) Sitemaps generator : This plugin has to be the best site map generator ever created. The simple fact that this is better than others is that it generates the Site Map which is based on the guidelines set by Google. Although the only negative which I see with this plugin is that it’s a memory hog. It uses up quite a lot of RAM of the servers and that can alert the server admin.

2. Sitemap Generator Plugin : This plugin is not XML Sitemap generator, it develops a page with the links to various section of your blog. This plugin is highly customizable and provides the options of selecting categories. Although the creator of the plugin also uses Google XML Sitemaps generator.

3. Tutorial of generating sitemap : Jim Westergren has written a nice tutorial on various ways of generating sitemap and it’s a must read for every blogger, who wants to save the RAM, by not using Google xml sitemap generator.

Important Tip : Always have the SiteMap Link as the last link in the blog. For this you can edit the footer.php and just before < / body > tag you can add the link of sitemap, which has been generated by these plugins.