For a sitemap protocol to be appropriately recognizable, your XML file must contain some tags. Furthermore, the sitemap file is also required to be UTF-8 encoded. How this works will be explained shortly.

Basic Sitemap example

To get you started, below is a very basic sitemap file example that can even guide you to create your first sitemap. In this example, we have used a single URL:

There are more complicated examples of sitemaps that you can find elsewhere in this tutorial,

XML tags

To enable you understand better, the lines of the sitemap file have been revised below, one after another.

• Opening Tag: You must start every Sitemap XML file with an opening tag <urlset> and end it with </urlset>.
• Parent Entry: Start each “parent” entry with <url> tag and end it with </url>.
• Child Entries: Similarly, each “child” entry should be contained between <loc> and </loc> tags.
• URL: Insert a URL that should start with http:// just after a <loc> tag.

**Note that the URL shouldn’t exceed 2048 characters.

• A date in the format has to be inserted to the <lastmod> tag.

It is important to note that this tag doesn’t require modification every time the document is changed. The dates will be available whenever the search engines crawl the documents.

• To determine the frequency in which a page is modified and how frequent it should be indexed, the <changefreq> tag is used to hint to the crawlers.

Bear in mind that the crawl bot behavior is not determined by the value indicated as it depends entirely on the search engine.

One of the following values are expected by the <changefreq> tag; never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or always.

It is important to note that “always” should only be used for pages that are thoroughly created or modified upon each access. On the other hand, the “never” value doesn’t necessarily mean that the page will never be indexed; it sure will, like once a week.  

• The <priority> value can range from 0.0 to 1.0

Priority value only indicates personal preferences on how you would like your site indexed. Pages that have not been prioritized by default have the value set at 0.5. This means that pages with higher priority value will be indexed first in descending order.

Note that priority value is relative and therefore should only be used for the website and not every page. Even if you were to prioritize all pages, there is no guarantee that they will be indexed more often because the value is not used to compare one website to another.

Exceptional characters in the Sitemap file

As earlier discussed, every sitemap has to be UTD-8 coded, which can easily be done upon saving the sitemap file. UTF-8 format is compatible with nearly all text editors.

Entity escape codes for the following characters should be used in all data in the sitemap.

Character Escape Code

• Ampersand & &amp;
• Single Quote ' &apos;
• Double Quote " &quot;
• Greater Than > &gt;
• Less Than < &lt;

Finally, always remember that the overall size of your sitemap shouldn’t exceed 10MB. You can easily create sitemaps with the help of our website mapping tool, http://dynomapper.com/. 

Welcome to the sitemap tutorial that has solely been created to help your find your way around creation and validation of sitemaps for your website. It gets better, if you currently don’t have a website, sign up here for a 14 day trial of our sitemap generator that will help you plan your new website.

Before we proceed further, especially on the step-by-step guide on how to generate sitemaps, below is some general information about sitemaps for you.

Sitemap Defined

This tutorial is based on sitemap protocol 0.9 that was released by SiteMaps.org that is standard, validated and used by all major search engines like Google.

Well, a sitemap enables you to generate a file that is hosted among other files in your account to notify the search engines about all the pages contained in your website. In short, it avails complete information regarding your site’s content to the search engines.

In as much as sitemaps are primarily used to boost your website’s indexing process by search engines, they can also offer accessibility to some pages. If you like, a number of pages that cannot be accessed through the menus can still be indexed by the search engines.

Sitemaps don’t alter the usual way your pages are indexed by crawler bots but only broaden your content’s visibility and accessibility.

Note; just by having a sitemap on your website is not a guarantee that all pages will be indexed and added to the search engines. Furthermore, sitemaps have no effect on your page rank, and therefore, shouldn’t be treated as an SEO tool.

This sitemap tutorial looks into the following topics;

• Sitemap Format - For information on the default sitemap format and how different tags in the XML are used, visit this section for more.  

• What does a XML sitemap look like? - It is in this section that you will encounter a simple sample sitemap. You can use the example provided as a base for your own website’s sitemap.

• How to have multiple Sitemaps and Sitemap index - Learn about some limitations and how to add a big number of URLs in a sitemap in this section.

• Sitemap Validation - Get information on sitemap validation for your site in this section. You can use a sitemap creator to validate the sitemap.

To ensure that we maintain very high standards especially in our offering of world-class feature-rich hosting packages, our team will constantly update the information contained herein to make it more accurate and useful as you seek to create your sitemap, whether you do it manually or with the aid of a sitemap creator. In fact, sitemap generators will save you the pain of understanding the rather complex process.

What is a Text Sitemap and How is It Used?

Initially, during the earlier versions of websites sitemap creators, sitemaps that were text-formatted were used to submit your website pages to Yahoo search engine. Even though Yahoo later announced support of XML sitemaps, it is no longer used for search engines.

Here is a sample of a text sitemap, created using DYNO Mapper visual sitemap generator.The main reason we have made this option available in our sitemap creator is because we believe having a simple list of all links on your website that you can easily refer to in a single place, just one text file is important.

Additional Resources:

Build a Sitemap
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en

Mobile Sitemap Explained

Most people today access the internet on their mobile devices; smartphones and tablets. Therefore, if you have a responsive website carefully developed for use on mobile devices, then you must consider creating a different mobile sitemap. This should be submitted independently to the search engines to enable them serve search requests from mobile devices better, then guide them to the pages of your site.

Note that mobile sitemap has to only contain links to pages with mobile web content. If not, just use the normal xml sitemap. An independent sitemap generator caps mobile sitemaps to the first 50,000 pages.

Before you use mobile sitemaps, consider the following;

• A mobile sitemap is not necessary for responsive websites that displays or loads content depending on the browser capabilities
• Create separate URLs for mobile content when using mobile sitemaps
• Initially, mobile websites and sitemaps were designed for feature phones, that is, phones whose browsers didn’t match usual capabilities of desktop browsers. This is no longer the case because most smartphones have equally capable browsers as the desktops. 

Only URLs using presentations like WAP that are used by feature phones are counted as mobile URLs when a mobile sitemap is submitted, all the others are still listed as web URLs.

For more information, check out Google webmaster Tools.

Additional Resources:

Making Websites Mobile Friendly
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

What is A News Sitemap and How is It Created?

News has to be delivered when it is still fresh, that is the only way it qualifies as news. Therefore, timely indexing of news content on your website is important and the ease in which the same is accessed by your visitors is crucial. Google news sitemaps feeds the search engine with relevant metadata about particular news content available on the website. The use of Google news sitemap makes it easier and faster for Google News to find news items on your site. For a comprehensive coverage, the crawlers are directed to the URL for every news item.

The title and the date of publication of each article are identified by the sitemap. In addition to that, the nature of content carried in the article is clearly specified with the aid of genres and access tags. Descriptions such as relevant keywords and stock stickers are used to fish out article content. Google News is best suited for;

• New websites
• Sites with dynamic content
• Websites that contain paths that requires that several links are clicked to reach a news article. 

Note that you are required to request for inclusion into Google News first before you can use Google news sitemaps, otherwise, the processing of your sitemap will not be possible.

Our sitemap generator automatically tracks any changes on your website and generates news sitemap in a different file. Only new URLs for the most recent days are included. 

Sign up for DYNO Mapper, and create your own News sitemap. More details are available on google webmaster tools help pages.

Additional Resources:

Tips for News Search
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/tips-for-news-search.html