Google has "spiders" that crawl the web by jumping from link to link. If your website has pages that aren't linked to from the homepage (orphan pages), Google might never find them.
An XML Sitemap is like a roadmap for these spiders. It lists every single URL on your site that you want indexed.
The XML Sitemap Generator crawls your URL, finds internal links recursively, and builds this file for you.
Key Attributes
<loc>
The full URL of the page. Must be canonical (e.g., https://example.com/page).
<lastmod>
The date the page was last changed. This tells Google: "Hey, I updated this yesterday, come re-scan it!" It saves crawl budget.
<priority> (0.0 to 1.0)
A suggestion to Google about how important a page is relative to others. Homepage is usually 1.0. Contact page might be 0.3.
<changefreq>
How often the page changes (always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never). A news homepage is "hourly". An "About Us" page is "yearly".
How to Submit
Once you generate the file:
- Upload it to
yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. - Go to Google Search Console.
- Paste the URL in the "Sitemaps" section.