In this lesson, you'll learn everything you need to know about sitemaps from the foundational basics. Every SEO should know to the process of creating and submitting sitemaps to Google as well as using sitemaps to further your site's search visibility. A sitemap is a simple XML file containing a list of your websites most important content including video and images. It doesn't have to contain every page on your site, but it should list every page you want to rank in search the site map helps us search engines crawl bot understand what it should look for on your site. The primary way a Search bot discovers pages on your site is through your internal links, but not all your pages will be interlinked well enough for Google to find them. So your sitemap acts as a secondary tip-off to Google's Bots to important Pages you want indexed and ranked. That's why you don't want to clutter it with Pages. You don't need to rank. Sitemaps can also help you improve your SEO strategies sitemaps listing pages on specific sections of your site only like product pages. For example, let you run highly targeted site Audits and uncover problems at a granular level. You can use site maps to evaluate the health of specific content types or sections of the site and spot issues that you'd otherwise Miss if reviewed in a full site crawl. Site Maps use an XML format to include the data Note that in spite of all the code you can clearly see specific page URLs and Associated data like when the page was last modified. The URL section contains all that information the lock tag specifies the URL. It's also the only required tag and the site map. Last mod contains the date of the Page's last modification priority specifies the priority of this URL against other pages on the site values range from one to zero note how the homepage is priority is the highest. Well Pages further in the architecture had the priority relevant to how deep they are in the site structure. Site maps have some limitations though. The file can be no larger than 50 megabytes. It also cannot contain more than 50,000 URLs, whichever the two comes first. It has to be encoded with utf-8 encryption and it should contain only pages with the 200. OK status code. What if you have more than 50,000 URLs you want indexed? You can create multiple site Maps. It's also one of the most effective ways to monitor individual site sections as you've seen above when creating multiple sitemaps, make sure to also create a sitemap index a single file listing all the site maps on your site. You can submit just the site map index file to Google and the search engine will use it to access all the individual site Maps you've created. Most CMS's like WordPress or Joomla offer dedicated plugins for creating and updating. The sitemap. Every time a page is created or updated more advanced plugins will also automatically create individual sitemaps for each website section. If your CMS doesn't offer that functionality, you can use a crawler to create the site map as well. A crawler collects all the information about pages on the site as it goes through them that information is stored in the database and the crawler can output it in the site Maps XML format. This is what that looks like in SEO Clarity site audit crawler. With Clarity audits, you can crawl the entire site and build a sitemap from that information or you can set it up to access specific sections only to create individual site Maps. Google can find the sitemap on its own. However, it's a good practice to submit it to Google and let it process the data. First upload your site Maps XML file or files to the root directory of your server. The file should be accessible by going to domain.com slash sitemap. -index.xml. Your sitemaps file name might be different. Login to Google search console and go to sitemaps in the left sidebar type in your site Maps file name in the section at the top of the screen. This will submit the site map to Google.