An XML Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft united to support a standard Sitemaps protocol to provide Webmasters with a universal format for creating a catalog of site pages for all three major search engines. The XML sitemap protocol was written to be scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size.

XML sitemaps are useful in helping the search engine spiders crawl and index your site's content. For SEO, it is a good practice to submit your XML sitemap to Google via Google Webmaster Tools in order to help Google with the indexing of your site's content.

Visit Sitemaps.org to see an example of the proper XML Sitemaps format that is accepted as seen below:

<?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>