The Ultimate Toolbox for creating
amazing web sites!

Adding a sitemap to your website

The sitemap tool creates a XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google and other search engines to help them crawl your website better. A Sitemap is a XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

It's important that you specify the full URL to your website, for example https://www.wysiwygwebbuilder.com/
This URL must begin with the protocol (such as https) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it.
Do not include the name of the sitemap, this will be added by the software!

Sitemap properties
Change frequency
How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page.  Valid values are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never  The value "always" should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be used to describe archived URLs.

Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Even though search engine crawlers consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages marked "hourly" less frequently than that, and they may crawl pages marked "yearly" more frequently than that. It is also likely that crawlers will periodically crawl pages marked "never" so that they can handle unexpected changes to those pages.
Priority
The priority of this page relative to other pages on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your pages in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between pages on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the pages on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between pages on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.

The final step is to tell Google where it can find your sitemap.
https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome

The location of the sitemap will be something like:
http://www.yourwebsiteurl.com/sitemap.xml
You can specify the change frequency and priority for each page in your website.
Sitemap button
Sitemap frequency
Sitemap priority
Related tutorial
Add a robots.txt to your website