One of the most important tricks used in SEO (search engine optimization) is the creation of a sitemap of your website. There are two types of sitemaps: HTML maps and XML sitemaps. HTML maps represent an HTML document that contains the entire structure of your site transposed in links, beginning with the homepage.

It provides an easier navigation for your website visitors. The XML sitemaps were implemented by search engines in order to simplify the understanding of your website structure during the crawling actions. It is recommended to use an XML sitemap for large websites that have dynamic content, many pages and as a consequence a complex structure. The basic structure for an XML sitemap has the following code:


For a complete XML sitemap, the block code between urlset XML tag will repeat itself for every webpage URL. The "lastmod", "changefreq" and "priority" are optional tags and define the modification date, the page content change frequency and the priority of an URL relative to other. The "changefreq" tag can be set as always, never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, depending how often you change their content. The "priority" tag will define the importance of a URL compared to others and the tag can have a value between 0 and 1. The default value is 0.5. The "priority" tag will determine the search engine bot crawling priority for certain webpages. A value close to unity will mean a higher bot priority for the URL http://www.mypage.com.

The "lastmod" tag gives the date when the last modification took place for the page having the URL http://www.mypage.com/. The "lastmod" and "changefreq" tags are used in conjunction. It is not recommended to set the maximum priority value and frequency "always" for all pages, because they will be ignored by search engines. The value provided for frequency will be identical in most of the cases with the spider (bot) crawling frequency. If you have a site having tens to thousands of pages you can set the crawling frequency to always, daily or hourly and remember that the last modification date will be correlated with the page change frequency by the spider. In case of a static website, made only from HTML pages you should adopt the value yearly or never.

You should know also the fact that only having a sitemap will not guarantee you a higher search engine rank. It is also suggested that you should not use a sitemap if your site has been indexed by search engines robots. You can create a XML sitemap in various ways. The simplest method is to generate it by using a free XML sitemap generator, such as Simple Map. After you created it, you must put it in the root of your website, in the same directory with the index page.