I needed a really easy to setup sitemap plugin for Wordpress. My requirements are very simple. I needed a plugin that was:

• Simple to set up
• Could do the most basic sitemap function (listing all pages on a Wordpress site)

Plugins that exceeded my requirements would have been welcome.

So not knowing much about Wordpress, I searched for "google sitemap" from the Wordpress backend and I came across the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. The name itself described everything that I wanted.

Also, the description for the plugin showed that it is recently updated, and it has over a million active installs. 

For someone who knows very little about Wordpress, this looked like a good plugin.

After it's installed, the plugin can be found in Wordpress from the Settings menu item in the sidebar. The link text to click on is XML-Sitemap.

You don't have to do anything to use this plugin. Once it's installed you can visit the plugin settings page in the Wordpress backend and it gives you a link to your sitemap. It's really easy and wonderful.

This sitemap url can be submitted to Google through their webmaster tools web site. Don't forget Bing and Yahoo, and other crawlers too. 

I just needed a simple sitemap for my Wordpress site, but this XML Sitemap Generator plugin for Wordpress was not only easy for a novice to use to create a simple sitemap. It also offers a lot of other features and advanced options settings.

For instance, you cal tell the plugin which pages should and shouldn't be included in the sitemap. You can tell the plugin which pages should have priority in your sitemap. And if you choose to include Wordpress category pages in your sitemap, you can exclude any categories you'd like to be excluded.