Wanna get found? XML sitemaps help ensure that Google, Bing and other search engines can effectively find, crawl and index all of your site's pages – and our free XML generator allows you to create one in a flash. These simple files play an outsized role in improving your ranking so as far as SEO best practices go, getting your Google XML sitemaps in order is a no-brainer. Slickplan's free sitemap tool makes it easy.
Go from no XML sitemap to having one submitted to Google in a matter of minutes (seconds even if your site is only a few pages) with this straightforward steps:
Head over to Google Search Console and upload the file so Google can crawl and index your site, here's how:
Creating an XML may be easy peasy with our free sitemap generator – FYI we also have an XML generator for Blogger – but it doesn't mean it's error-proof. A common issue with any XML sitemap creator is not ensuring that your robot.txt is able to be crawled before attempting to generate the sitemap.
After our XML file generator works its magic, you'll be left with a file that'll likely look pretty foreign to you because XML is a text-based markup language. That means that while you'll see some recognizable text and links strewn about, you'll also see a bunch of unrecognizable text. That latter text, or the technical tags, is for search engines and it's good to know exactly what Google and the like are getting and how they're using it.
| XML tags explained | ||
|---|---|---|
| <urlset> | Required | This starts the entire XML file and defines the protocol standard in use. |
| <url> | Required | Used to denote the beginning of the information for each URL entry, or page, on your site. All the tags below this describe that information more specifically. |
| <loc> | Required | Yea, the <url> tag doesn't tell you the URL of the given page, this one does, i.e., https://www.sitename.com/services |
| <lastmod> | Optional | The date, formatted in w3C, when the content on that particular URL was last modified. |
| <changefreq> | Optional | This represents an estimate of how frequently a page is likely to change to give search engines a heads up to recrawl the page. The possible words you'll see here:
|
| <priority> | Optional | Represented by a value between 0.0 and 1.0, this describes how important a URL is relative to and compared with others on your site. Your homepage will default to 1.0 and the default for the rest is 0.5. The best way to think of it is that the further from the homepage something is, the lower the number. That said, sitemap priority won't affect search ranking as Google doesn't even read this one and changefreq is also not particularly important to them. |
Given that your XML sitemap is optimized for search engines to read, you may be wondering how to create a sitemap for the actual people that visit your site. That'd be an HTML sitemap and it's something our sitemap creator can sort out for you.
Given how often we mentioned Google above, you can't be blamed for thinking this would only work with Google and might as well been called the Google XML sitemap generator! Rest assured though, the XML file generated can be used with all other search engines.
So, you have an XML file but how do you know it's legit and functional? That's where another one of our SEO tools, the sitemap validator, comes in handy. Upload your XML file and we'll check that it's all good or let you know if anything needs to be fixed.
