Sitemap Generator

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all important pages on your website in a structured format that search engines can easily read. It helps search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo discover, crawl, and index your pages more efficiently. A sitemap is especially important for new websites, large sites with many pages, or sites with complex navigation structures.

To use this sitemap generator: 1) Enter your website URLs in the form, 2) Set the last modified date for each URL, 3) Choose a change frequency (how often the page updates), 4) Set priority (0.1-1.0, with 1.0 being most important), 5) Click 'Add URL' to add more pages, 6) Copy or download the generated XML sitemap, 7) Upload it to your website's root directory as 'sitemap.xml'.

Priority values range from 0.1 (lowest) to 1.0 (highest) and indicate the relative importance of pages on your site. Use 1.0 for your homepage and most important pages, 0.8-0.9 for key category pages, 0.5-0.7 for regular content pages, and 0.1-0.4 for less important pages. This helps search engines understand which pages to prioritize when crawling your site.

Change frequency tells search engines how often a page is likely to change: 'always' for pages that change with each visit, 'hourly' or 'daily' for frequently updated content like news or blogs, 'weekly' for regularly updated pages, 'monthly' for occasionally updated content, 'yearly' for static pages, and 'never' for archived content. This helps search engines optimize their crawling schedule.

After generating your sitemap: 1) Save it as 'sitemap.xml' and upload to your website's root directory, 2) Add the sitemap URL to your robots.txt file (e.g., 'Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml'), 3) Submit it to Google Search Console under 'Sitemaps', 4) Submit to Bing Webmaster Tools, 5) Most search engines will automatically discover it through robots.txt.

A single sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB uncompressed. If your website has more than 50,000 pages, you'll need to create multiple sitemap files and use a sitemap index file to reference them all. Most small to medium websites will fit within a single sitemap file.

Include all important, publicly accessible pages that you want search engines to index. Exclude duplicate content, login pages, admin pages, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages with noindex tags, low-quality or thin content pages, and pages you don't want appearing in search results. Focus on quality pages that provide value to users.

Update your sitemap whenever you add new pages, remove old pages, or make significant content changes. For blogs and news sites, update weekly or when publishing new content. For e-commerce sites, update when adding/removing products. For static sites, update monthly or quarterly. After updating, resubmit your sitemap through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure search engines crawl the changes.