XML Sitemap for SEO

XML sitemap are best an easy method to inform search engines about the website content/pages.

XML sitemap lists URLs for a website along with additional information like: date of update, how frequently usually changes, and importance.

XML sitemap offer the ability for you to give a priority ranking to all your webpages on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the most important and 0.5 being the default neutral rank. For example your index page you would give a ranking of 1.0 to, while your terms of service page you would probably want to assign a 0.1 to. This point value system helps the search engines by giving them and their bots a way to know which pages on your site you value most and therefore which to spider more frequently.

Sitemap allow search engine crawlers that support XML sitemap to crawl up all URLs in the Sitemap and access those URLs using the associated information.

XML schema for the Sitemap protocol. The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags.

The Sitemap must follow these rules

Sitemap begins with an opening tag and end with a closing tag
You should specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
Include a entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
Include a child entry for each parent tag.

Other tags are optional. You should refer to each search engine’s documentation for details.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
      <loc>http://www.indian-seo.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2004-12-15</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.5</priority>
    </url>
  </urlset> 

Using an XML sitemap will help ensure:

=> All site pages are crawled and indexed.
=> Frequently-updated site pages are crawled more often.
=> New site pages are quickly indexed.

If you don’t have a webmaster account with Google or are too lazy to go around to the various search engines and submit the sitemap URL by hand but still want to get your sitemap indexed faster than by letting the search engines eventually find it on their own, you can simply place the URL to your sitemap directly in your robots.txt file for sitemap auto discovery by the search engine bots the next time they visit your site.