Adding additional information to a Sitemap
Each URL in a Sitemap can be described using the tags below. Depending on the method you used to create your Sitemap, some tags may be already present in your Sitemap.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
* Specify how often pages change
* Specify when a page was last changed
Prioritize the pages on your site
The optional priority tag describes the relative priority of all pages on your site. This priority can range from 1.0 (extremely important) to 0.1 (not important at all).
You can modify your Sitemap to indicate the relative priority of pages on your site. For example, your home page might be extremely important (1.0), while a product category page is very important (.
, and a product detail page less so (0.6). You might choose to set the importance of other pages, such as disclaimers and legal information, lower still.
Setting the priority of pages will never affect your site's ranking in Google search results. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs 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.
The priority value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites. Because this value is relative to other pages on your site, and not to other pages on the web in general, assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help your site's search ranking. In addition, setting all pages to the same priority will have no effect.
Specify how often pages change
The optional changefreq indicates how frequently the page is likely to change. Valid values are:
* always. Use this value for pages that change every time they are accessed.
* hourly
* daily
* weekly
* monthly
* yearly
* never. Use this value for archived URLs.
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.
Specify when a page was last changed
Use the optional lastmod tag to indicate when a page was last modifed. Use the date format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD, where the date and time value are optional.
