How to create a sitemap.xml file

If you care about where your web project is placed in the search engine result pages (SERPs), you will know exactly how many different factors influence the fight for the top places. For example, the list of factors that affect Google’s ranking includes over 200 criteria, some of which have been of­fi­cially confirmed by the company, but some have only been assumed by experts. It’s no secret that search engine op­tim­isa­tion has been the standard for every webmaster wanting their website to be visible and ac­cess­ible. While factors such as relevant keywords, high-quality content, or a high level of mobility are well-known factors, the value of a good XML sitemap is often un­der­es­tim­ated.

An XML-Sitemap (sitemap.xml) is a text file in XML format (extensible markup language) that contains a list of all a website’s subpages in link form. As such, it can be uploaded to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to notify search engine crawlers of all available and relevant pages to speed up and optimise the indexing process. XML sitemaps must meet the re­quire­ments of the sitemap protocol, which was agreed as standard by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in 2006 – with the aim being to improve the quality of search results delivered in the long term. For this, the encoding in UTF-8 (among other things) and the markup language XML, as well as the use of entity codes for certain char­ac­ters (such as “>” instead of “>”), are required.

Even if there is no guarantee that Google and other search engines’ indexing will be optimised due to XML sitemaps being used, the struc­tured link dir­ect­or­ies increase the chance of this being the case. The crawler-friendly table of contents can also pay off, es­pe­cially for sites with dynamic content that are subject to constant change. The same applies to larger web projects that have many subpages but not a big backlink structure (yet). Sites like these tend to be checked too ir­reg­u­larly for changes to be noticed or aren’t even picked up by the search engines’ radars. Thanks to sitemap.xmp, you can help them get noticed by indexing bots more quickly.

An ad­di­tion­al advantage: as well as listing URLs of subpages, XML sitemaps can also list media files such as videos or images. For these, there are even extra tags that tell the crawler what content type is being used (e.g. <image>, <video>). In addition, at­trib­utes can be used that describe the content in more detail or specify the duration, so that search engines can optimally identify it. There is also a special version of the XML sitemap for news portals, which promises articles will be optimally indexed thanks to specific at­trib­utes such as genre, pub­lic­a­tion date, or title.

The format­ting of an XML sitemap works with XML tags, just like every document in the ex­tens­ible markup language. According to the current standard “Sitemaps 0.9,” three tags are required for it to be con­sidered an XML sitemap.

Apart from these mandatory XML at­trib­utes, the sitemap tags <priority>, <lastmod>, and <change­freq> provide three ad­di­tion­al tags for spe­cify­ing the in­di­vidu­al URL entries. However, the extent to which these optional tags are supported depends on the re­spect­ive search engine. For example, the Google crawler primarily uses <lastmod> markups for indexing, while it largely ignores the other two at­trib­utes or only allows them to flow minimally into the crawling process.

Since an XML sitemap file may contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs and may not be larger than 50 MB, the URL col­lec­tion of larger web projects can also be dis­trib­uted across several documents. In this case, however, each sitemap document should be listed in an ad­di­tion­al index file whose structure is similar to that of the sitemap files: The tags <sitem­ap­in­dex> and <sitemap> must be used instead of <urlset> and <url>.

The easiest way to un­der­stand the structure of an XML sitemap is to use a concrete example:

In this case, the example XML sitemap lists the main URL one-test.website and the URLs of two subpages (page1 and page2). Search engine crawlers can see from the document that the main page has been given the highest priority by the webmaster and that modi­fic­a­tions are made ap­prox­im­ately once a month. The last ad­just­ment was made on 1st January, 2018. Page1 has the default priority value (0.5), but unlike the main page, it has been estimated that it will be adjusted weekly, with the last modi­fic­a­tion having taken place on 5th March, 2018. If the crawler works with the sitemap priority attribute, it knows that it must pay the least attention to page2 during indexing (<priority> value: 0.3). The subpage is modified weekly (last modified on 8th March, 2018).

Given the huge amount of work involved in manually creating XML sitemaps, choosing plugins or online tools is a good idea – provided that you use them correctly. Reas­on­able XML sitemaps can be generated without specific con­fig­ur­a­tions, but the structure dir­ect­or­ies will only be able to have the desired form when the ap­pro­pri­ate, in­di­vidu­al settings are correct. For our example, we present the pos­sib­il­it­ies offered by XML-sitemaps.com’s online generator and the WordPress plugin Google XML sitemaps for the creation and in­teg­ra­tion of XML sitemaps.

Download the generated XML sitemap file and upload it to your website’s route directory. To inform the Google crawler about the file, for example, simply submit the file in the Google Search Console. Al­tern­at­ively, you can specify the path where the sitemap can be found anywhere in the robots.txt file: