Best XML Sitemap Generators

XML sitemap generators help generate an XML sitemap that will allow web crawlers to index a website. XML is a file type that stores data in text form, and it's mainly used for exchanging or storing structured data. The XML sitemap generator lists URLs easily readable and can be updated by hand or through programming scripts. This map will only be as powerful as the information it contains, so every page should have at least one URL listed under it, with exceptions that are noted with robots instructions.

The best XML sitemap generator doesn't include session IDs from URLs because it reduces duplicate crawling of those URLs. It also must break up large sitemaps into smaller sitemaps and list only canonical URLs in sitemaps. Sitemaps are a recommendation to Google about which pages you think are important. Google does not pledge to crawl every URL in a sitemap, and the position of a URL in a sitemap is not important. It does not crawl URLs in the order in which it appears in your sitemap.

XML Sitemap Index

An XML sitemap index is a set of URLs, which form an index for a website and its corresponding XML sitemaps in the Google webmaster tools. The purpose is to let Google know the complete structure of your website and generate SEO-friendly URLs. It is important because it helps improve readability by verifying that all the pages are included in whichever tags the user desires within the XML sitemap generator.

XML Image Sitemap

XML image sitemap is a website that creates an image sitemap for your website. It comes in handy for submitting to Google's webmaster tools to successfully get your site indexed quickly with all images found, all pages found, and other important news items.

XML Video Sitemap

The XML video sitemap is designed to simplify and automate building and submitting a video sitemap using the Google webmaster interface. This enables webmasters to create, validate, upload quickly, and submit a video sitemap for their website or multi-page site without having access to programming skills.

Google News Sitemap

The Google XML sitemap allows you to provide the URLs of your website's pages so that Google can find them. The generator works best with single-page sites, such as blogs or scripted pages, although it can also be used for multi-page sites.

Mobile Sitemap

The mobile sitemap is a separate XML file added to the main XML sitemap to help search engines index your site better for mobile devices. It lists all of the same URLs in your XML sitemap, with one modification. It specifies which pages should be listed for use on small screens by specifying only the path and filename, without any URL parameters or query string parameters.

HTML Sitemap

HTML sitemap in XML sitemap generator is a program that creates XML site map files listing all URLs on your website and further categorizes those URLs by domain, path, or host. It creates an HTML document with links to your entire content, making it easy to navigate the directory of your website.

Location Tag

In the XML sitemap generator, the location tag is the place where your website will be located. The location tag specifies the ultimate destination of a hyperlink. The value of this tag is the absolute URI to a human-readable web page that displays information about your company or product.

Last Modified Tag

The last modified tag is the publicly available date and time when the content was updated, which can change based on variables like how recently a page has been loaded or how long ago it was posted. Web crawlers most often use it to facilitate cache updating. It also allows crawlers to crawl pages using an old copy of a page’s content if that’s necessary instead of bypassing them because their last modification time has passed.

Change Frequency Tag

The change frequency tag indicates how often the website should be crawled in terms of days. The most common values are "always" and "every day.” Higher values will result in higher priority for indexing your site. Lower values will result in lower priority for indexing your site but require fewer requests from Googlebot.

Priority Tag

XML sitemap generator features a priority tag that allows you to set the priority of each page. The higher the priority, the more frequently it gets crawled by web crawlers and displays in better positions or faster on SERPs.

Using the Sitemap protocol format that consists of XML tags. All data values in a sitemap must be entity-escaped, and the file itself must be UTF-8 encoded. The XML sitemap using the generator must:

1. Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.

2. Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag.

3. Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.

4. Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

The speed of the sitemap generator script depends mainly on the speed of the site being crawled. If your site creates the page in 5 seconds (including network connection times), then the XML sitemap generator cannot process it earlier than received. So, faster sites are crawled faster.

The priority tag in the sitemap will only indicate the page’s importance with the other URLs on your site and will not affect the ranking of the page on search results. Marking a URL as a priority will not prioritize other public web pages all over the internet; the only priority it takes is over the other pages contained within the single website. You are not given priority over other sites in the search results, and only the single page is over your other pages.

Yes, if a sitemap is larger than 10MB, gzips are recommended to compress it. Gzip is a free file formatting software application that is used for both compressing and decompressing. The size limitations for sitemaps and sitemap index files must be no more than 50,000 files and no larger than 10MB.

Using the XML sitemap generator makes a pre-built list of keywords and phrases and determines what words should be used in the title and description tags for each page on the website. To use the XML sitemap generator:

Step 1:

Go to the website of the XML sitemap generator.

Step 2:

Enter the URL of the website.

Step 3:

Choose a file type for the sitemap (XML is recommended).

Step 4:

Click on "save".

Step 5:

The XML sitemap will automatically be generated in the format of the XML sitemap.

A website using an XML sitemap generator will exclude the RSS feed page if the user wants to. This is because it creates a new XML sitemap for the site, excluding the RSS feed page. To exclude the RSS feed page:

Step 1:

Install the software on your computer or the extension and open it.

Step 2:

Locate your website address in the space provided and click to add it.

Step 3:

Once you have added all the pages you wish to include, click "show all pages" in the box that says "filter your pages." This will show all of your added pages in alphabetical order.

Step 4:

Uncheck anything you do not want to be included in your XML sitemap, so it is not visible.

Step 5:

Select "save changes" at the bottom of the screen before closing the XML sitemap generator.