In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site - often by section - and is meant to help users find the information they need. The second type is the XML Sitemaps are a way for you to give Google search engine information about your site.

The XML site map is the most useful as a marketing tool today. In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a XML Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Sitemaps are necessary if:

You can also use a XML Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including. How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months. The date each page was last modified should be noted. The relative importance of pages on your site can also be shown you .might have a relative importance of 1.0 on Index page and on sub categories have an importance of 0.8, and individual topic pages may have an importance of 0.7. This priority indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site.

XML Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. XML will help Google crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but it does not guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting XML Sitemaps.

The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded. The Sitemap must:

The following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

While a standard Sitemap works for most sites, you can also create and submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content. These Sitemap formats are specific to Google and are not used by other search engines. They're a good way to give Google detailed information about specific content types. For example, publishers can use News Sitemaps to give Google information that can appear in Google News search results, such as publication date, keywords, and stock ticker symbol. Sitemap formats include: