Above we saw some generic examples of XML sitemaps. Now that you have an idea of what to expect from this type of file, let's see what they look like once they are loaded with all the information about a website . And, just to make sure, let's also see an example of an HTML sitemap.
XML Sitemap Example
Structure is key in XML sitemaps and this belgium mobile database sitemap is a good example of this.
Real XML Sitemap Example – Source:Zara Spain
If you zoom in (or have a good pair of glasses handy) you'll be able to make out almost all of the tags we mentioned above. They all encapsulate information so that it's easy for the bot to read. In other words, it follows the rules of XML: opening and closing tags and an XML declaration at the top.
When you enlarge the image, you will see that the first entry, which corresponds to Zara's main page , has a priority of 1.0 . This shows that this is an example of a correctly ranked sitemap. The remaining URLs are within the same category (the help section) so they have a similar priority level: 0.8 .
You'll also notice that the <changefreq> tag says “daily.” This doesn't necessarily mean that pages are updated daily. However, it does act as a “hint” to search engines about how often they should crawl the page. This helps to cover future updates somewhat .
Finally, what really adds a touch of style? The little arrows next to each <url> tag allow you to open and close each entry to simplify the file.