XML Sitemaps: Best Practices for SEO

XML sitemaps help search engines discover and index your pages more efficiently. They list all important URLs on your site along with metadata about each page.

Why Sitemaps Matter

Sitemaps are especially important for large sites, new sites with few external links, sites with pages not well linked internally, and sites that change content frequently. They help search engines find pages that might be missed during regular crawling.

Sitemap Structure

Each URL entry can include: loc (the URL, required), lastmod (last modification date), changefreq (how often the page changes), and priority (relative importance from 0.0 to 1.0).

Priority and Changefreq

Priority tells search engines which pages are most important relative to other pages on your site. Set your homepage and key landing pages to 0.8-1.0. Set blog posts to 0.6-0.7. Set archive pages to 0.3-0.4. Changefreq should honestly reflect how often content actually changes.

Sitemap Limits

A single sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50MB uncompressed. For larger sites, use a sitemap index file that references multiple sitemaps.

Submitting Your Sitemap

Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also reference it in your robots.txt file. Our Sitemap Generator creates properly formatted XML sitemaps from your URL list.