Sitemap

Sitemaps are of two types.One is describing the list of pages in a site. Actually this is for the easiness of the user, to access each and every page directly from a page containing links to all pages.

However the second type of sitemap is more important as it is a criteria of search engine optimization. Actually this is an xml file which consists of fully qualified links to each and every pages in the site

The Sitemap Protocol requires certain tags to be present in your XML file in order to be properly recognized

Let us consider an example for Sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">


   <url>

   <loc>http://domain.tld/</loc>

   <lastmod>2008-01-01</lastmod>

   <changefreq>daily</changefreq>


   <priority>0.1</priority>

   </url>

</urlset>

XML tags in the Sitemap file



Every Sitemap XML file must begin with an opening tag and must end with .
Every "parent" entry should begin with tag and end with .
In a similar way, every "child" entry should be placed between and tags.
After a tag, an URL is expected which should start with "http://".
The length of the URL can be 2048 characters at most.
The tag expects a date in the following format YYYY-MM-DD.
Be advised that you do not have to modify this tag each time you modify the document. The search engines will get the dates of the documents once they crawl them.
The tag is used as a hint for the crawlers to indicate how ofter the page is modified and how often it should be indexed.

Note that this value may or may not affect the crawl bot behavior which depends solely on the search engine.

The tag expects one of the following values: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never.
Be advised that "always" is used for pages which are dynamically generated or changed/modified upon every access. As for the "never" value – be advised that even if you mark your page with a never value most probably it will be indexed once in a week for example.

The value can vary from 0.0 to 1.0.

Be advised that this indicates only your personal preferences for the way you would like to have your website indexed.

The default value of a page that is not prioritized is 0.5. Any page with higher value will be crawled before the page with priority 0.5, and all pages with lower priority will be indexed after the page with 0.5 value.

Since the priority is relative it is used only for your website and even if you set a high priority to all of your pages this does not mean that they will be indexed more often, because this value is not used to make comparison between different websites.

The sitemap file should be also UTF-8 encoded.