Sitemaps Format

The sitemap.xml file must be encoded with UTF-8. Example of sitemap:

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

As you can see, each URL in a sitemap contains four pieces of metadata:

• urlset - Sitemap start and ending tag. Sitemap document start with <urlset> and ends with </urlset>
• URL - parent tag for each URL entry
• loc - URL of our site.
• lastmod (Optional) - A last modified timestamp. This tells search engines whether or not they should re-index the page to reflect any changes that have been made.
• changefreq (Optional) - A change frequency indicator (This can take the values: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never). This gives search engines an indication of how often they should come back and re-index the page.
• priority (Optional) - A number from zero to one indicating the page's importance compared to other pages on the site.

The last three values only give search engines an indication of when they can or should index or even re-index a page. It is not a guarantee that it will happen, although it makes it more likely.