Details About Sitemaps XML Format

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:

• Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing tag.
• Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
• Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each parent tag.

All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine's documentation for details.
Also, all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com or store.example.com. For further details, refer the Sitemap file location

Sample XML Sitemap

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

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/

<lastmod>2005-01-01

<changefreq>monthly

<priority>0.8

Source : sitemaps.org

Posted in: SiteMap