What are Xml Sitemaps?

Sitemaps provide a way for you to tell search engines about the pages on your website that might not otherwise be found, as well as provide additional supporting information about the pages.

They are essentially a structured list of all the pages in your website.

As well as the list of pages you can advise search engines on when the page was last updated, how often it is updated and the relative priority of each page within your website

XML sitemaps are the preferred option for detailing your website and contain more detail to inform the search engines about the structure of your website.

The core elements of an XML Sitemap are :

  •     Web page address
  •     Last modified date
  •     Update frequency
  •     Relative priority within your site
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">  
<url>  
     <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>  
     <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>  
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>  
      <priority>0.8</priority>  
</url>  
</urlset>  

XmlSitemapGenerator.org was set up to allow webmasters to easily create basic sitemaps for their website without the need to hand craft them, install software or write complicated scripts.