Sitemaps/Syntax

The syntax for the Sitemaps protocol is in XML format, encoded in UTF-8, and is very strict. A Sitemap must begin with an opening  tag and end with a closing   tag.

Within the  tag, you must specify the protocol standard. You must include a  entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag, and include a   child entry for each   parent tag. All other tags are optional, although support for them may vary among search engines. As such, you should always refer to each search engine's documentation for details.

All URLs must be from a single host, such as www.example.com.

Sample
A sample XML sitemap is shown below. It contains just one URL and uses all optional tags.