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What can a sitemap be useful for? Actually, for two kinds of readers: human beings and search engines.
A good sitemap allows your visitors find quicker and easier the information they’re searching for and, at the same time, helps the search engines to crawl your website more rapidly.

Here’s one thing you should notice: your visitors don’t browse your site the same way Google crawls it. In fact, while the search engine spiders search for codes to crawl, they read words printed on web-pages.

In fact, to maximize your results, you need two different kinds of sitemaps, one for each eye: A sitemap page, exclusively for your visitors to browse and a sitemap file in xml format, available for the search engines.

Read on and you’ll learn how to create both of them and what you should do with them to get the best SEO results.

Sitemap for SEO
Creating a sitemap for the search engines is very straightforward, especially if the site we are talking about is a Wordpress Blog. Here are two easy ways you can create it.

1) Wordpress, as an open source project, has got Thousands of plugins and add-ons. One of these is the sitemap plugin, which automatically updates the sitemap of your website each time you publish a new post. Download it, install it and activate it and it will do it on autopilot every time.

2) A different Manual way to do the job is actually creating your sitemap using free web-based tools, like www.xml-sitemaps.com. Give it the url of your website and it will create you the sitemap in xml and html format, both ready to use.

Once you’ve got your sitemap, you can upload it via FTP on the root directory of your website.

Sitemap for human visitors
We just said that the www.xml-sitemaps.com tool gives you the map in html format too. You can take that file, adapt it with an HTML editor in order to conform it to the standard graphics of your website and upload it via FTP.
Actually, there’s a more sophisticated way to do it, converting the xml file to html, but to do this you need detailed java language knowledge, or you could outsource the conversion to a freelance coder. I strongly suggest you to go for the first option.

More tips
As for the HTML map, don’t forget to check it before uploading it. The creator generates the map following the crawling instructions you give the search spiders in your robot.txt file. If you haven’t done it or your file is not updated, you may list pages you wouldn’t want to, like download pages for your paid products.

If you want to validate the XML prior to uploading to the search engines (useful if you have made any manual adjustments), use the XML validator (http://www.Xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html) where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check its conformity to the current standard.

For more tips like these ones, I invite you to visit Giovanni Farotto’s Blog at http://blogautoposter.free.fr/blog/ and subscribe to its RSS feed.