Recently, my preferred WordPress extensible markup language Sitemap plugin stopped functioning correctly. It could be because this plugin's author had not updated it to become compatible with a current version of WordPress I am using 4.8.1. I decided to look for another extensible markup language sitemap generator for both Bing and Google search engines.
Luckily, I found Google extensible markup language xitemaps plugin coded by Arne Brachhold. This is like my third or fourth WordPress extensible markup language sitemap plugin I have had to use. Hopefully, this plugin author will not abandon this plugin and keep updating the code.
Using a WordPress extensible markup language Sitemap can be crucial to your website's Search Engine Optimization's success. You want to first make sure that you do not have a current robots.txt file in the root directory of your website files. This plugin will conflict with a robots.txt file that is located in root directory of your website.
You will want to click on Plugins on left hand side of WordPress. You want to choose Add New. Then you can type in Google extensible markup language in a Search Plugins box in upper right hand corner.
You will want to look for Google extensible markup language Sitemaps and click on an Install button. Once this plugin is successfully installed then you can click on Activate. You will want to click Settings in WordPress and look for and select extensible markup language-Sitemap.
You probably do not need to change any settings. However, if you have a robots.txt file in you website root folder then you can remove a check from an option to create a virtual robots.txt file in WordPress. I had to delete a robots.txt file in order to get this plugin to create a sitemap extensible markup language file on this anetcomputers.com website domain.
Remember if you have a domain.com/robots.txt file it may interfere with this plugin. Under Sitemap Content you can select other types of content that you want included in this sitemap extensible markup language file. You then click on Update options if you made any changes.
You have just created a sitemap extensible markup language file that search engine robots such as Bing, Google, Yahoo, etcetera index your website with. This is a crucial search engine optimization step, so that your website starts receiving traffic. As an added bonus tip, you can take this newly created uniform resource locator yoursite.com/sitemap extensible markup language and submit it to Bing and Google using both a Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Webmaster Tools.
This will tell both search engines where to look for a sitemap extensible markup language file to index your website. Also, this plugin will automatically update this sitemap extensible markup language file and even notify both Bing and Google of new content you created.