The most recommended way to understand a sitemap’s structure is to scrutinize an existing one. In this regard, we have gone ahead and prepared a sample map that can be used as a guide when creating one for your website. Simply copy the codes below and tweak where necessary to meet your specific objectives.

Note that creating a sitemap is now simple and stress-free, thanks to leading website mapping tools like http://dynomapper.com/. Anyone can now create a sitemap, you don’t have to be a programmer or spend hours on it because the tool will take care of all the details for you, try it out. 

http://www.domain.com/catalog?item=vacation_hawaii</loc>

There are various reasons why you might want to have multiple sitemap files in just one directory. If your website is very active, you sure will want to have a daily sitemap to take care of time-sensitive URLs and a weekly one for not-so-time-bound URLs. You can have as many sitemaps as you want so long as all the listed URLs are in a sub directory or a common location as the sitemap. What matters here is to ensure that the sitemaps shouldn’t have URLs from parent directories or entirely dissimilar directories. In the event that the above happens, the metadata won’t be trusted because it won’t be certain that the submitter has any control over the URL’s directory.

There are some known limitations associated with sitemaps. First, it shouldn’t be larger than 10 MB, and shouldn’t contain URLs exceeding 50,000. It is for this reason that you must use sitemap index if you intend to design a website with numerous sitemaps and directories.

With a sitemap index, you can include numerous sitemap files in just a single file known as sitemap index. The index uses similar index but the URLs have to be added to sitemaps as opposed to including the web pages’ URLs.

Find a sample sitemap index code below.

As clearly visible in the above sample, the following XML tags are used by the sitemap index;

• Loc
• Sitemap
• Lastmod
• Sitemapindex

The <lasmod> and <loc> tags are similar the ones in any normal sitemap file. Information regarding an independent sitemap is summarized by the <sitemap> tag while the <sitemapindex> tag offers information regarding every sitemap contained in the file. Always remember that sitemap files can only be files situated in the same subdomain or domain and has to be UTF-8 encoded too.

Your sitemap should be placed into your web server’s directory, this is highly recommended. This is because the set of URLs that can included in your sitemap’s file is determined by where it is located.

Example: A sitemap file that is located below a subdirectory can have links of all the pages in the very subcategory but not those above it. 

To effectively define the attributes and allowable elements that can appear in a sitemap file, search engines like Google utilizes XML schema. As shown in the example below, Google schema can easily be downloaded via the links provided below

• Sitemap schema from SiteMap.org for Sitemaps: 

• Sitemap Index schema from SiteMap.org for Sitemap index files: 

Based on this schema, you can use any of the many available tools to enable you validate your sitemap’s structure. For the complete list of available XML-related tools, visit, among others W3.org XML Schema Tools.

Please note that;

• The crawling process is not influenced in any way by the position in which you insert the URLs of your sitemap.
• It is not advisable to incorporate session IDs in your URLs because doing that may lead to erroneous or lack of crawling of the specific page
• In case your websites uses HTTP as well as HTTPS, do not add the two versions of your URLs, instead, select one you deem to be more fitting for the content.

Technology has simplified most of these processes because all you need today is an XML sitemap validator that will validate your xml sitemap and can even inform Google of their exact locations. In the event that problems are detected in your sitemaps, Dyno Mapper sitemap validator will communicate the same to you instantly so that you can make necessary changes before submitting it to the search engines. The location of your sitemap can also be pinged on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com.

Dyno Mapper experts highly recommend that you use Google Webmaster Tools to inform the search engine of your new sitemap. 

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.