Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For WordPress.

There is one page that should not be left out when building your website, and that page is a Sitemap.

Usually a good Quality WordPress theme will already have a Sitemap page template built into it, but if you are using a basic theme without different page templates I suggest you use a plugin to build your sitemap.

The Dagon Design Sitemap plugin. is a great plugin that will automatically build your Sitemap, it’s easy to set up and the end result is a very professional and user friendly Sitemap for your WordPress website.

The plugin can easily be installed using your favorite FTP client or it can be installed straight from inside of your WordPress Admin area. You can find the plugin by doing a keyword search using the keywords Dagon Design Sitemap.

After you have installed and activated the plugin there are a couple of settings you need to tweak before your Sitemap can be built.

But first, we need to create the page for your Sitemap.

To create your Sitemap page, just type into the page title area the name of your Sitemap page, I simply use the term Sitemap, you can add any additinal meta data, keywords ect… but at this stage leave the main content area blank.

Click on the Publish button when finished.

After we have our blank Sitemap page created, it’s time to configure the plugin settings.

To find the settings page for the plugin, look in the left sidebar for a link under the Settings tab with the text DDSitemapGen. Click the link to continue.

The first part of the configuration page is the General Options.

The first couple of options are fairly self explanatory.

Choose the language you want your sitemap to display and the number of items to display on your sitemap page, any new pages will automatically be generated for you.

It’s the third option, Sitemap page slug that I would like to clarify here.

The sitemap page slug is the exact location of the sitemap webpage.

In the image below you can see that my sitemap is located directly after my main websites URL.

Everything between the two /’s is your page slug.

Your slug will always be in lowercase letters and remember, never leave a space when your page has a multiple word title.

The next section, which is the Sitemap Generation settings is basically where you determin how you want to display the content on your sitemap.

This really is a personal preference and as you can see, your choices are very clearly defined and laid out.

In the next section Exclusions, is where you can choose what posts and pages you want to hide from being visible on your sitemap.

My article titled How To Hide Pages In The XML Sitemap will walk you through the process of hiding pages in your sitemap, the only difference here being you have  two text areas, one for posts and the other for pages.

In the Navigation section, you choose how you want the sitmap navigation to be displayed, this is a personal prefference and comes down to what you feel is best for your visitors.

and finally the Miscellaneous section.

In this section you can decide whether or not you want to display a link to your XML sitemap, and where you want the link to your XML Sitemap to be displayed, I personally suggest you add your XML Sitemap in here if you haven’t already included it somewhere in your site.

You also have the option of whether or not you want the links on your Sitemap to open in a new window.

I do not recommend you open internal links in a new window.

There’s a whole debate on forcing links to open a new window, and it’s a fairly contentious one.

If you want to open external links in a new window, that is up to you, but having internal links open in a new window is beyond comprehension.

OK, So now that we have configured and set up our sitemap plugin, we now need to add a lttle peice of code into our sitemap page to get the Sitemap to work.

Click on the Edit link under the Pages section in your Settings sidebar to edit your Sitemap page.

Once your Sitemap page is open you need to paste this code into your page.

`<!– ddsitemapgen –>`

Make sure you paste the code above, into your page with the HTML tab chosen.

Then save your changes by clicking on the Update Page button and your done.

Now go to your new Sitemap page and check out your new User Friendly Sitemap.