Free Sitemap Generator

Place sitemap.xml in your website's root directory so it's accessible at https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Then add a reference in your robots.txt file: "Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml". You can also submit it directly to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

A sitemap doesn't directly boost rankings, but it helps search engines discover and index your pages faster. This is especially valuable for new websites, sites with thousands of pages, or pages with few internal links. Better crawling leads to better indexing, which leads to better visibility.

A single sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB (uncompressed). If your site has more than 50,000 pages, you'll need a sitemap index file that references multiple sitemap files.

Update your sitemap whenever you add, remove, or significantly change pages. Most CMS platforms and static site generators can auto-generate sitemaps on build. For manually maintained sitemaps, update at least monthly or whenever you publish new content.

Priority is a value from 0.0 to 1.0 that indicates the relative importance of pages on your site. However, Google has publicly stated that it largely ignores the priority and changefreq fields. They're still part of the sitemap protocol and other search engines may use them, so it doesn't hurt to include them.