XML Sitemap Generator

Create an SEO-friendly Sitemap to increase your site's indexing coverage and visibility in search results. This XML Sitemap Generator tool provides scalable solutions for all types of websites, from small blogs to major eCommerce enterprises.

There is no need for any coding or technical knowledge. Just put a list of up to 50,000 URLs from your site and click the Generate XML Sitemap button. This tool will generate it automatically for you.

Sitemap and SEO: Is Sitemap Important for SEO?

Sitemaps have been around for a long time, but the issue is if they are still useful for SEO in 2022.

Any SEO professional will tell you that having a sitemap on your website is essential! Have you ever wondered why every SEO emphasizes the importance of having a sitemap? What exactly is a sitemap, and why is it important in SEO?

A sitemap specifies the most essential pages on a website, ensuring that search engines can locate and index them. Sitemaps also aid in understanding the structure of your website, making it easier to explore.

Do you want Google or another search engine to crawl every page of your website? However, certain pages may become orphaned, that is, without any internal links leading to them, rendering them inaccessible to anybody visiting your website.

A good sitemap serves as a guide for your website, allowing search engines to quickly identify all of your important pages, regardless of whether your website has an internal linking structure or not. Sitemaps are important not just for search engines, but they may also be valuable for individuals looking for a certain page on your website.

While sitemaps may benefit both search engines and end users, each prefers a unique sitemap design. Web spiders use XML, whereas humans use HTML. Allow us to clarify sitemaps and their importance in SEO, regardless of design or style.

Google's Recommendations

Google requires all sitemap formats to follow the standard sitemap protocol. Google presently does not consume the priority> property in sitemaps.

A single sitemap in any format is limited to 50MB (uncompressed) and 50,000 URLs. If your file is longer or contains more URLs, you will need to divide your list into numerous sitemaps. You may generate a sitemap index file (a file that refers to a number of sitemaps) and submit it to Google as a single index file. Google accepts numerous sitemaps and/or sitemap index files.

Types of Sitemaps that Google supports

• XML
• RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0
• Text

A very basic XML Sitemap that Google supports:

Here is a very basic XML sitemap that includes the location of a single URL:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1/sitemap-image.xsd">
  <url>
    <loc>https://walterpinem.me/projects/tools/meta-tags-generator/</loc>
    <lastmod>2022-06-09T15:58:42+00:00</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

This XML Sitemap Generator tool supports a type of XML Sitemap that Google supports, which contains a <urlset> of each submitted URL and its last modified date, which is by default today's date.

What pages should you include in your sitemap?

There is a really easy method for determining which pages to include in your sitemap. Consider the significance of a URL. For example, does a URL give any value to the person who visits it? Do you want people to visit that website? If not, it should not be included.

If you exclude pages from your XML sitemap, this does not always mean that search engines will not index the URL. They can index it if they can discover the URL via links. Other than omitting that page URL from your sitemap, if you don't want that URL to appear in search results, you'll need to include a 'no-index' and a 'follow' tag.

Which pages should you leave off of your sitemap?

Certain pages should be excluded from your sitemap by default. These pages are detailed below.

1. Pages that aren't canonical
2. Pages that are duplicates
3. Pages with pagination
4. URLs with parameters
5. Pages of site search results
6. URLs derived from filtering options
7. Pages from the archive
8. Any 3xx redirections, 4xx missing pages, or server error pages (5xx)
9. Robots.txt-blocked pages
10. Pages that have no index
11. Pages available via a lead generation form (PDFs, etc.)
12. Login pages, wishlist/cart pages, and so forth.

To make it easier for search engines to locate all of your sitemap files at once, make sure you:

1. Submit your index sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. In your robots.txt file, specify your sitemap index URL.

Wrapping it up

Sitemaps may look to some to be an unnecessary effort, while to others, they may be a need for their website. A sitemap can be especially useful if:

1. You have a sizable website.
2. You have an ineffective interlinking approach.
3. Your website is brand new.
4. There are less hyperlinks to your website.

A sitemap developed with a commercial aim in mind might be the driving force behind a website's success.