Sitemaps are now very important factors for SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It enables the Robots or Crawlers of Search Engine reach every page of your website. To make an XML sitemap..
The Sitemap must:
- Begin with an opening
<urlset>tag and end with a closing</urlset>tag. - Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the
<urlset>tag. - Include a
<url>entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag. - Include a
<loc>child entry for each<url>parent tag.
Note that XML tags for sitemaps are predefined by an entity named Sitemap.org to be standardized. And note that XML and HTML tags are different. XML Tags holds data while HTML tags holds values to be displayed in a website. Below is an example of an XML sitemap…
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.w3downloads.com/</loc> <lastmod>2009-07-26</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>
Since most websites nowadays have thousands of sub-pages then making a sitemap by yourself will simply consume your day. I suggest you use the Free XML sitemap maker to avoid the hassles. All you need to do is download the software, install it, add a project (your website), edit preferences, run the crawler, save the file, and that’s it!
After generating your sitemap.xml, you can now submit it to your Google Webmasters Tools account, then after several days Google will crawl most of the relevant pages you submitted.
Tags: frequency, google, html, lastmod, priority, sitemap, tags, tutorial, urlset, xml
