Online blogging is crowded to say the least. There are more and more blogs and websites being added each day, so to cut through the noise, you’ll need to apply some good techniques to stand out from the pack.

Running a successful blog requires that you follow some basic blogging rules such as updating your blog regularly, submitting it to get indexed by search engine companies and securing it.

One of the essential elements that make a blog successful is how fast and often it gets indexed by search engines. If you’re running a blog and the audience you’re targeting can’t find you online when they do a search, sooner than later your blog will become irrelevant.

To be relevant, you must follow these basic blogging rules so that search engines can fine and index your content quickly before your competitors.

One of the quickest ways to get your content indexed efficiently is by using a sitemap file. A sitemap file is an .xml file that contains all the links, pages, images, categories and posts of your website, mostly categorized from newest to the oldest content.

By using sitemaps, you can get your content submitted to search engines quickly and indexed efficiently.

Google and other big search engines recommend using sitemaps to submit your content. You don’t have to use it to get indexed, but using sitemaps will get in indexed quickly and efficiently.

Without the use of sitemaps, search engines must go and gather all the links, posts, categories, images and pages of your site and index them as they see fit.

If you want some control, you need a sitemap file.

When it comes to WordPress, there are many plugins that offer sitemap functionality. Off all the plugins on WordPress directory, I have personally used two of them and they both worked great.

If you’re looking for a sitemap plugin for your WordPress blog, you may want to do some research. If you don’t know what to install, these two.

 

  • Google XML Sitemap plugin

 

Google XML sitemap WordPress plugin is by far the great in my opinion. This plugin will generate your content (links, pages, images, posts, categories and others) that you can submit to Google, Bing and other popular search engines to better index your content.

It also helps search engines crawlers or bots to get a better structure of your blogs so that they can index your content efficiently. So, if you don’t currently have a sitemap plugin for your WordPress blogs, you should definitely install this plugin.

 

  • Yoast WordPress Seo plugin

 

Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugins is a great SEO plugin. Not online it is a great SEO plugin, but it also provides a module that allows webmasters to generate XML sitemaps for their sites and submit to search engines.

The only reason I’m not using Google XML Sitemap plugin is that Yoast SEO plugin Sitemap provides almost the same functionality as Google XML Sitemap. By using Yoast SEO plugin, I have one less plugin to install on my blog.

I used Google XML Sitemap for as long as I owned a blog and only stopped only after Yoast WordPress SEO plugin included a sitemap for free.

 

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin

 

 

If you don’t have a Sitemap plugin, please go and install one now, and then submit it to Google, Bing and other search engines.

Enjoy! and Happy blogging.