Just as it’s difficult to find a new destination without a map, it’s sometimes hard for Google to find all the pages on your website without a sitemap. Luckily, it’s quick and easy to create and submit an XML sitemap to Google. Below, we walk through how to do this step by step. But first, let’s cover a few basics. This is the parent tag for each URL. You must specify the location of the URL in a nested <loc> tag. Crucially, these must be absolute, not relative, canonical URLs. How to Create Although this is the only required tag here, there are a few optional properties: <lastmod>: Specifies the date when the file was last modified. This must be in the W3C Datetime format.
For example if you updated
A post on September 25th, 2019, the attribute would read 2019-09-25. You can also include the time, but this is optional. <priority>: Specifies the priority of the URL executive email list relative to all other URLs on the site. Values range between 0.0 and 1.0. Higher is more important. <changefreq>: Specifies how frequently the page is likely to change. Its job is to give search engines some idea as to how often they might want to recrawl the URL. Valid values here are always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. None of these optional tags are that important for SEO. For <lastmod>, Google’s Gary Ilyes states that they ignore it in most cases as “webmasters are doing a horrible job keeping it accurate.”
How to Create they
Ignore this tag because it’s just a “bag of noise.” For <changefreq>, John Mueller says “Priority and change frequency doesn’t really play that much of a role with IT Email List Sitemaps anymore.” Google discovers new content by crawling the web. When they crawl a page, they pay attention to both internal and external links on the page. If a discovered URL is not in their search index, they can parse its contents and index it where appropriate. But Google can’t find all content this way. If a web page isn’t linked to from other known pages, they won’t find it. This is where sitemaps come in. Sitemaps tell Google (and other search engines) where to find the most important pages on your website so they can crawl and index them.
