XML Sitemap Generator

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website in a format that search engines can easily read. Think of it as a roadmap for Google, Bing, and other search engines - it tells them exactly which pages exist on your site and gives them hints about how important each page is.

The sitemap uses a standardized XML format that includes the URL of each page, along with optional metadata like when the page was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other pages on your site.

Sitemaps are especially useful in a few key situations.

• Your site is new and doesn't have many backlinks pointing to it yet.
• You have a large website with hundreds or thousands of pages.
• Your pages aren't well-linked internally and might be hard for crawlers to discover.
• You have a lot of media content like images or videos that you want indexed.
• Your site uses JavaScript heavily and pages might not be easily crawlable.

Even if your site is small and well-structured, having a sitemap doesn't hurt. It's basically free insurance that search engines will find all your important content.

Here's a quick breakdown of each setting in this tool.

• Priority tells search engines how important a page is relative to other pages on your site. It ranges from 0.0 to 1.0. Your homepage might be 1.0, main category pages 0.8, and individual blog posts 0.6. This is just a hint though - search engines can ignore it.
• Change Frequency indicates how often the page content typically changes. Options include always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. Be honest here - if a page rarely changes, don't mark it as daily.
• Last Modified is the date when the page was last updated. This helps search engines know if they need to re-crawl a page or if their cached version is still current.

Keep in mind that these are all hints to search engines, not commands. Google and other crawlers will ultimately decide how often to visit your pages based on their own algorithms.

Once you've generated and downloaded your sitemap, here's what to do next.

1. Upload the sitemap.xml file to your website's root directory (so it's accessible at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml).
2. Go to Google Search Console, select your property, and navigate to Sitemaps in the left menu.
3. Enter "sitemap.xml" in the field and click Submit.
4. Do the same thing in Bing Webmaster Tools if you use it.
5. Add a reference to your sitemap in your robots.txt file by adding: Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Google will start processing your sitemap within a few hours to a few days. You can check the status in Search Console to see if there were any errors.

A few tips to get the most out of your sitemap.

• Only include canonical URLs - don't add pages that redirect or have duplicate content.
• Keep your sitemap under 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed. If you have more, split it into multiple sitemaps and create a sitemap index file.
• Update your sitemap whenever you add new pages or make significant changes to existing ones.
• Don't include pages blocked by robots.txt or pages with noindex tags - that sends mixed signals to search engines.
• Use absolute URLs (including https://) rather than relative paths.