Site Map

A site map is a file that lists all the URLs in your website (for pages, files, images and everything else) that search engines use as a map for crawling your site. Your site map should live in the root or top-level directory for your website's files, so the URL for it might look something like this: http://www.coolexample.com/sitemap.xml.

You can create your site map using a variety of formats, such as XML, HTML or RSS. Depending on the format you use, you can include a few details (meta data) with each URL, such as the last modified date, the change frequency, or the priority.

Search Engine Visibility creates an XML site map file customized with your selections. For more information, see sitemaps.org.

How Search Engines Use It

A sitemap in your top-level directory

Code Example

For demonstration purposes, only. Do not use.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.coolexample.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2012-06-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.coolexample.com/about.htm</loc>
<lastmod>2012-05-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.coolexample.com/help.htm</loc>
<lastmod>2011-04-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>