It was recently announced that WordPress.com blogs have XML sitemaps, which are automatically submit to search engines for better search indexing and optimization.

Now, most of you reading this are probably self-hosted WordPress users. How do you get your own sitemaps for your self-hosted blogs? This is where the Google Sitemap Generator plugin comes into play.

Contrary to the name, the plugin will actually automatically generate and submit sitemaps to not just Google – but also Live, Yahoo, and Ask. This will provide a similar automated sitemap solution, similar to the feature WordPress.com recently rolled out. More information on this plugin can be found in this WordPress SEO tutorial, an earlier article featured on Theme Lab.