What is XML sitemap example?

What is XML sitemap example?

An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all. It also helps search engines understand your website structure. You want Google to crawl every essential page of your website.

What should be in an XML sitemap?

Only Include SEO Relevant Pages in XML Sitemaps

  1. Non-canonical pages.
  2. Duplicate pages.
  3. Paginated pages.
  4. Parameter or session ID based URLs.
  5. Site search result pages.
  6. Reply to comment URLs.
  7. Share via email URLs.
  8. URLs created by filtering that are unnecessary for SEO.

What is Lastmod in Sitemap XML?

lastmod : the date of when the content on that URL was last modified. The date is in “W3C datetime (opens in a new tab)” format. priority : the priority of the URL, relative to your own website on a scale between 0.0 and 1.0.

How do I make a good XML sitemap?

If you’re ready for your website to get indexed faster by search engines, just follow these five easy steps to create a sitemap.

  1. Step 1: Review the structure of your pages.
  2. Step 2: Code your URLs.
  3. Step 3: Validate the code.
  4. Step 4: Add your sitemap to the root and robots.
  5. Step 5: Submit your sitemap.

How many URLs can an XML sitemap have?

All formats limit a single sitemap to 50MB (uncompressed) and 50,000 URLs. If you have a larger file or more URLs, you will have to break your list into multiple sitemaps. You can optionally create a sitemap index file (a file that points to a list of sitemaps) and submit that single index file to Google.

Should sitemap include images?

It isn’t necessary, but if you really want to ensure that every image is indexed by Google, then it will be beneficial to do this otherwise you might not have them all discovered simply by crawling.

Is Lastmod important in sitemap?

The last modified date is a response typically contained within a sitemap file and is used to inform search engines when a page was last updated. This can be used to encourage a search engine to re-crawl a page faster due to the content being seen as updated.

What is Loc in sitemap?

A Glossary of Tags Used in an Image Sitemap – This tag encloses each image URL. You can list up to 1000 such tags. – This contains the URL of the image. – This tag contains a caption for the image. It is optional.

Which tag is used in sitemap?

tag
The Sitemap index file must: Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag. Include a entry for each Sitemap as a parent XML tag.

Can you have multiple sitemaps?

Yes, you can! You might want to have multiple Sitemap files in a single directory for a number of reasons. For instance, if you have an auction site, you might want to have a daily Sitemap with new auction offers and a weekly Sitemap with less time-sensitive URLs.

Can you list images in an XML sitemap?

Google extends the XML sitemap schema to include tags for images and videos. These media tags can be added to any URL tag on an XML sitemap. Google extends the standard XML schema for sitemaps, making it possible to submit not just a page URL, but also important images and videos directly to the search engine.

How many sitemaps should I have?

Typically, every website must have at least two different types of sitemaps, XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. The XML sitemap is essential for proper indexing, crawling of pages on your website by search engines while HTML is designed for web users and placed on the home page of the site.

Are sitemaps still necessary?

Without this sitemap, they would not be able to build the full menu of available pages until they completed a crawl of the whole site. Every site has a specific amount of crawl budget allocated to their site, so no search engine will simply crawl every URL the first time it encounters it.

Are sitemaps Important for SEO?

XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites. There is no downside of having an XML Sitemap and having one can improve your SEO, so we highly recommend them.

Should images be in sitemap?

What is sitemap syntax?

An XML (Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a text file used to detail all URLs on a website. It can include extra information (metadata) on each URL, with details of when they were last updated, how important they are and whether there are any other versions of the URL created in other languages.

What is an XML sitemap?

It’s a particular type of sitemap called a sitemap index. It houses other individual traditional sitemaps of each sitemap for your website. Our sitemap is formatted to look clean, but often, the XML sitemap looks like raw HTML. You can check out this example from the site of Forever 21:

Should archive pages be included in the XML sitemap?

As best practices, we generally recommend excluding archive pages from the XML sitemap and to noindex them as well (ex. blog category pages, tag pages, author pages, date archive pages, etc.). Only canonical pages need to be included.

When did Google start using XML Sitemaps for url discovery?

Google started using XML sitemaps in 2005 and shortly after was joined by search engines like MSN or Yahoo. Nowadays, they use them for even more than just URL discovery. Every website should have an XML sitemap. They are especially important for:

How do I manually generate a sitemap?

Manually Creating a Sitemap

  1. Create a text file and save it with a .xml extension (ie. sitemap.xml)
  2. First lines of the file:
  3. Create an entry for each URL. The tag is required, the others are optional.
  4. Last line of the file:
  5. Upload the file to your server and then submit it to the search engines.

How do I create a sitemap in HTML?

Steps to Setup your HTML Sitemap Page:

  1. Install the plugin on your WordPress site.
  2. Create a page titled “Site Map”.
  3. From your site’s WordPress admin screen, hover over “Settings” and click “SEO HTML Sitemap”.
  4. Settings:
  5. Add a link to your new HTML Sitemap page in your websites footer.
  6. You’re done!

What is the difference between HTML and XML sitemap?

HTML Sitemaps are used to enhance the user experience and make it easier for humans to navigate your site. XML Sitemaps do essentially the same thing for machines and allow your website pages to be indexed faster.

Does a sitemap help SEO?

A sitemap is vital for good SEO practices, and SEO is vital in bringing in traffic and revenue to the website. On the flip side, sitemaps are essential to having search engines crawl and index the website so that the content within it can be ranked within the search results.

What is the difference between XML and HTML sitemaps?

The main difference between the two versions are that HTML sitemaps are easily read and understood by users while XML sitemaps are created for search engines. An XML sitemap is a file intended to be read by search engine robots. This file includes a lot of behind the scenes activity of a webpage.

How do I optimize a sitemap?

2. Structure XML sitemaps by site section

  1. Only include your ‘money pages’ You should only include URLs in your XML sitemap files that you won’t Googlebot to crawl, index and rank.
  2. Avoid non-200 HTTP status codes.
  3. Avoid noindexed URLs.
  4. Avoid URLs that canonicalise to another URL.

What makes a good site map?

Characteristics of a Good Sitemap A descriptive listing is not only important in helpings users easily find their way on your website, but also helps boost your rank in the search engines results pages. All links to pages with related content should be placed on each sitemap page.

How do you plan a sitemap?

Sitemap Tips and Planning Steps

  1. Step 1: Plan out your primary, top level pages.
  2. Step 2: Add your secondary pages (or dropdowns)
  3. Step 3: Leave room for content expansion.
  4. Step 1: Establish a URL Structure.
  5. Step 2: Code the Menus.
  6. Step 3: Use Alternative Navigation Menus (Top, Footer, Sidebar)