What is a sitemap?

Sitemaps are a vital component of website maintainance and SEO, serving as a means to communicate with search engines and facilitate the discovery of web content. In addition to the ubiquitous XML sitemaps, this document will also touch upon other formats such as RSS and HTML sitemaps.

As well as the list of pages you can advise search engines on when the page was last updated, how often it is updated and the relative priority of each page within your website. They can also contain information about news and media within your website.

Sitemaps help you improve your search engine coverage by providing a structured list of URLs, helping search engines understand and index site content more effectively. This can enhance search engine visibility, leading to increased organic traffic, and helps ensure that all essential pages are discoverable by users.

Types of XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are the preferred option for detailing your website and contain more detail to inform the search engines about the structure of your website.

The core elements of an XML Sitemap are :

• Web page address
• Last modified date
• Update frequency
• Relative priority within your site

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
     <loc>https://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org/en/</loc>
     <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

XML Sitemaps can also be extended to include details about media content in your pages such as images. to find out more check out our Example XML sitemap page.

Image sitemaps

Image sitemaps are actually an extension of XML sitemaps with the pages images included along side the page URL. Incuding images in your sitemap can help google find and index your images in search results.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org/en/</loc>
    <lastmod>2023-10-12</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org/images/image1.jpg</image:loc>
      <image:caption>Example Image 1</image:caption>
    </image:image>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>https://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org/images/image2.jpg</image:loc>
      <image:caption>Example Image 2</image:caption>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

As well as an image caption, information such as title, geolocation and licence can also be added.

News Sitemaps

A Google News sitemap is a specialized XML file that web publishers can use to help search engines discover and index news articles on their websites more effectively. It is important that news sitemaps contain original recent content for them to perform well and meet with googles guidelines.

They are similar to regular XML Sitemaps, but contain additional information such as content headlines.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/en/</loc>
    <news:news>
      <news:publication>
        <news:name>Sitemap Times</news:name>
        <news:language>en</news:language>
      </news:publication>
      <news:publication_date>2008-12-23</news:publication_date>
      <news:title>Breaking news: XML Sitemaps are awesome</news:title>
    </news:news>
  </url>
</urlset>

Other sitemap formats

As well as the offical XML Sitemap format, sitemap information can also be made available in a number of other forms.

RSS sitemaps are particularly useful for content syndication and SEO, while HTML sitemaps help ensure your entire website is navigable without orphaned pages.

RSS Sitemaps

RSS feeds are typical about informing search engines, directories and your users about new and updated content althgouh they can also be used to detail all the pages in your website.

The good thing about RSS feeds is that you can list all your new and updated webpages and submit them to the search engines and directories to improve the inclusion of new content.

<channel>
<title>Website name</title>
<link>https://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org/en/</link>
<description>Website description here</description>

<item>
     <title>A Sitemap entry</title>
     <link>http://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.com/example</link>
     <description>Sitemap entry description</description>
</item>
<item>
     <title>Another item</title>
     <link>http://www.xmlsitemapgenerator.com/xml</link>
     <description>Another entry description</description>
</item>

</channel>

HTML Sitemaps

HTML sitemaps are traditional web pages thatprvide a structured list of webpages in your website.

They are more accessible to people but also help search engies finding pages inyour website.

Unlike RSS and XML sitemaps, HTML sitemaps do not contain the same meta data about your pages.

Text sitemaps

Text sitemaps are a lesser used format, and are simly a list of URLs. These lists offer no real benefit over other formats, but can prove useful for maintainenace, such as migrating content, creating redirect lists, etc.