Step 7 - Creating a Sitemap
XML sitemap files are used by bots or spiders / crawlers to show search engines, like Google and Bing, where to find all the pages on your website and how they are organized.
What is a sitemap of a website?
A sitemap is a file in the root directory of your site where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.
Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.
The sitemap for this site is at https://thewebtoolbox.com/sitemap.xml. You will see a link to the file in the footer of each page.
What does an xml sitemap look like?
The snippet below shows the sitemap.xml file contents for this site up to this page.
<header>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>1</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/contact/contact.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/info/earnings.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/register/register.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/register/domain-setup.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/register/logo-design.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/register/favicon.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/register/php-editors.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/register/how-to-submit-a-site-to-search-engines.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/register/how-to-create-a-sitemap.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/code/page-structure.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
<url><loc>https://thewebtoolbox.com/utilities/language-code-finder.php</loc><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.85</priority></url>
</urlset>
What tools are available to create a sitemap?
Online sitemap generators are generally free to use for sites with less than 500 pages. Screamingfrog requires you to download a programme and to run it locally (on your pc).
Some free online generators for you to try