This is the first of a series of reviews of plugins for the popular WordPress platform.
The Dagon Design Sitemap Generator is free software and easy to set up and use. You can find it within WordPress itself if you search for Dagon, but at the time of writing, this was version 3.15, whereas version 3.17 is available direct from the author’s website. This review pertains to version 3.15.
The quick way to get it up and running is to install the plugin, create a new page called Sitemap (or whatever you like) and within the HTML editor, add the following text:
<!-- ddsitemapgen -->
This will generate a page that is automatically updated whenever you add a new post or page to your site. If your blog has more than 50 pages or posts, it is likely that the plugin will generate multiple pages so as to keep the number of links served on an individual page reasonably low.
There are plenty of options for configuration of this plugin. Under Settings, the plugin installs a new option “DDSitemapGen”. This provides you with various options for fine control over the appearance of the sitemap. The defaults are very reasonable and it is unlikely that you will experience a significant SEO benefit from changing them.
Each page installs a link to the author’s website. There is no option to disable this, but if it really bothers you, you can look for the following line of code in sitemap-generator/sitemap-generator.php:
$t_out .= '<div style="text-align: right;"><p style="font-size:90%;">' . DDSG_CREDITS . ' <a href="http://www.dagondesign.com" title="Dagon Design">dagondesign.com</a></p></div>';
I tested that change on one of my blogs and it works fine.
So why is this good for SEO? Well, it simply provides an easy way for the search engines to find your content, and a good way to ensure that your link juice is passed around the pages and posts that make up your site relatively evenly. You would normally have a small link to the sitemap on every page and post of your blog, probably somewhere near the top of the page.
There are many sitemap plugins that exist for WordPress. Many of these are XML sitemap generators, used for submitting to Google Webmaster Tools. These are not human-readable sitemaps. Commonly you will want to install one of these too, but that will be the subject of another article.
Do you like this plugin? Maybe you like to use a different plugin to generate your human-readable sitemap? Leave us a comment and let us know!
