The Simple Google Sitemap XML WordPress Plugin will generate a valid Google compliant XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It creates a sitemap including all of your WordPress generated pages and posts as well as custom pages. Every time you create or edit a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol are notified about the updates. This means you do not have to do anything to let the search engines know of the updates to the site, it is done automatically for you.

Once the Plugin is installed and activated it is quite easy to configure.

Select – Where do you want to store your XML file? In my website’s root folder is recommended.

You can configure the Parameters to match you needs, but no changes are needed as the default settings works just fine.

Categories and Tags also can be set to include ( recommended ) or do not include.

Save your settings and you are now ready to submit your sitemap to Google.

Submitting your Sitemap to Google.

If you do not already have a google account setup you will need to create one: Create New Google Account

Next, go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and sign in.

You will want to add your new site under the sites area. Check your WordPress site to see how your URL’s are displayed and enter your site information accordingly. For example does your site display as http://www.example.com or http://example.com

Next, you will be prompted to verify your ownership of the site you added. The recommended method is to download the .HTML verification file and upload it into your website and click the verify button.

Once you have verified the ownership of the site, you will now be able to submit the sitemap that you created from the Simple Google Sitemap XML Plugin.

Next, select the Submit a Sitemap button and enter the name of your sitemap file usually sitemap.xml. You may need to add additional path information as well if you did not select to save the sitemap.xml file in your websites root directory when configuring the plugin.

If everything worked ok without errors your sitemap will have been submitted to Google. You will have to wait a bit before it is fully submitted, and checked by Google for errors but you can come back and check the status of the sitemap at anytime.

For anyone serious about improving their SEO ranking in the search engines, this is a must have WordPress Plugin and the benefits far outweigh the little bit of work it takes to get it setup and configured.

The plugin is available to download and install from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-google-sitemap-xml/

WordPress does a good job of SEO ( search engine optimization ) right out of the box, but for those who want to optimize or tweak their SEO settings in WordPress you will need to install a plugin.

One WordPress plugin we recommend trying is the All In One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin. All In One SEO Pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. You can install it and forget about it and it will work, but it is highly recommended that you take the time and fine-tune the settings to get the most benefit from the plugin. The All In One SEO Pack plugin will allow you to edit and optimize the Title, Meta description, and meta tags for each posts you write.

Features listed on the WordPress Plugin Directories page:

• Support for Custom Post Types
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you can begin to optimize your site.

Visit: Your WordPress Dashboard > Settings > All In One SEO

Be sure to enable the plugin and at least fill in the Home Title, Home Description and Home Keywords boxes.

Next Visit: Your WordPress Dashboard > Posts > Edit Post

You will now have the option to set a unique Title, Description and Keywords for each post and optimize these settings without having to change the actual content of your posts.

There are other options that allow you to fine-tune your SEO settings more and you can continue to adjust the settings and optimize them until you achieve the results you want.

The All In One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin has been downloaded over 8 Million times and continues to be the SEO plugin of choice for most WordPress sites/blogs.

The plugin is available to download and install from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

There also is a Video Tutorial at: http://semperfiwebdesign.com/blog/all-in-one-seo-pack/seo-tutorial-video-for-all-in-one-seo-pack/