Your Sitemap Is SEO Infrastructure: What It Should and Shouldn't Include

A sitemap is an XML file that lists every URL you want search engines to index. It's not required. Google can discover pages by following links. But a sitemap ensures that orphaned pages (pages with no inbound links), deep pages (more than 3 clicks from the homepage), and newly created pages are discovered quickly. The format <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns= "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" > <url> <loc> https://example.com/page-1/ </loc> <lastmod> 2026-03-25 </lastmod> <changefreq> weekly </changefreq> <priority> 0.8 </priority> </url> </urlset> loc : The full URL. Required. Must be absolute (include the protocol and domain). lastmod : The last modification date. Optional but recommended. ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD). Google uses this to decide when to recrawl a page. changefreq : How often the page changes (always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never). Google largely ignores this field. It's not harmful to include but don't rely on it. prio