Generating a Sitemap for websites linked to a wordpress blog

[WaveMaker]

Greetings,

I'm looking for a way to generate a sitemap that will include static pages on my home directory, as well as my wordpress blog.  The site that I'm trying to build this for is in a temporary folder, and can be accessed at http://www.lifewaves.com/Website 3.0

I plan on moving the contents of this folder to the root directory for lifewaves.com whenever we are go for launch.

What I'm wondering is, is there a way to build a sitemap or sitemap index that will point to the static pages of my site, as well as the wordpress blog while taking advantage of the built in wordpress hierarchy?  If so, what's an easy way to do this.  I have generated a sitemap using Yoast, but I can't seem to find any xml files within the wordpress folder. Within the plugin is a button that I can click to access the sitemap index, but it just brings me to the homepage of my blog.

Can I build a sitemap index that points to a sitemap for the static pages as well as the sitemap generated by yoast?  Thank you in advance for your help!!

P.S. I'm kind of a noob.

[BenRWoodard]

I just found this article by Yoast himself.  Sounds like he ran into a few of the same hurdles you have and created a PHP script to help build a sitemap.  http://yoast.com/xml-sitemap-php-script/

Hope that helps.

The only other option I would recommend is to build the sitemap yourself.  I recently purchased http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ based on some of the other Q&A threads in SEOmoz and used it for a large ecommerce site.  It was a good fix to my problems.  Maybe a help, maybe not.

[ChrisDyson]

I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to automatically generate my sitemap for my blog. You can have more than 1 sitemap for a site so you could create a 2nd sitemap for the static pages & manually manage this as static pages are less likely to change. If the static pages are part of your Wordpress install then the plugin will pick these up too.

[WaveMaker]

Thanks, Chris.  Does it hurt my site in terms of SEO to have two separate sitemaps? I know there's no real answer for this, but I'd like to have a grip of the pro's and con's.

Also, I my brain was heading down this path with the idea that I could tie the two sitemaps together using a sitemap index which would list both of them.  Do you  know the default location of the sitemap generated by Google XML Sitemaps, and if the file name changes when it is updated?  I believe this is all the information I would need to put both in a sitemap index.

Thanks again!!

[ChrisDyson]

Having more than one sitemap is not an issue for SEO.if anything it makes sure the search spiders can definitely find your content.

The Google XML sitemaps plugin normally creates a file in the Wordpress folder i.e..

yourdomain.com/wp/sitemap.xml but you can define your preferred location

When you publish a new blog or page the sitemap will automatically update.

[WaveMaker]

Thanks, Chris. I was able to manually add my static pages in the root folder to the sitemap built by the google XML sitemap generator. This works out great since I can control their priority and other settings, including the location of the sitemap file itself.

One additional question is, within the sitemap, does the order of pages matter? In other words, if I want to drive more traffic to my static pages (not wordpress), should they come first in the sitemap, or does the priority ranking take care of this?

Thanks a million for all your help!!

[ChrisDyson]

It doesn't matter sitemaps are designed to make sure all your pages are crawled and improve the chances of indexing.

Happy Link building