XML Sitemaps are documents which list all the pages in a site, including some metadata for each page. They are useful for search engine indexing. Arne Brachhold has created a great free sitemap plugin for WordPress called Google XML Sitemaps

The Google XML Sitemaps specifications

You can find more info about XML Sitemaps at sitemaps.org, and in the FAQ section of Arne’s site. Understanding them is the easy party – it’s a simple XML specification. The laborious part is generating them.

Installing the Google XML Sitemaps plugin

Luckily for us WordPress users, Arne’s Google XML Sitemaps plugin does the job extremely well.

As with all plugins, you can either download them to your machine and then upload them to your server, or SSH into your server and work directly there.

Installing the WordPress plugin from your machine

• Visit the plugin page and click on the download link to download the zip file to your machine.
• If you don’t know where your browser downloads files to, most browsers have a Downloads window which you can open from the View or Window menu. If you right/CTRL click on the file in the list in the download window, a contextual menu will allow you to see where the file is
• unzip the file. On a Mac with StuffIt Expander, on Windows you can use a freeware utility called IZarc
• FTP the complete expanded folder onto your site’s wp-content/plugins folder. On a Mac you can use CyberDuck, on Windows FileZilla.

Installing the WordPress plugin directly onto the server

• Visit the plugin page, CTRL/right click on the download link and select ‘Copy link’ from the contextual menu
• SSH into your server, change directory as needed (if you don’t know how, don’t worry)
• download the plugin by typing wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/google-sitemap-generator.3.1.6.zip (replace the link with the one you just copied)
• unzip it by typing unzip google-sitemap-generator.3.1.6.zip
• copy it to the plugin folder cp -R google-sitemap-generator. [YOUR SITE ROOT FOLDER]/wp-content/plugins

Using the plugin

Either way, you can now login onto your admin console (http://yoursite/wp-admin), click on ‘Plugins’ on the navigation bar, and there you have it – your easily configured sitemap generator. It’s all very straightforward and well documented, and worked very well for me.

Submitting sitemaps to search engines manually

I’d recommend logging into Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, and the Yahoo Developer Network, to submit the sitemaps. If nothing else, that will let you see when the sitemaps have been indexed by the search engines.