It's an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

It should be placed in the root directory of your website (e.g., https://example.com/sitemap.xml).

A single sitemap file can have up to 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB. For larger sites, use a Sitemap Index file.

It's a hint to crawlers about how frequently the page is likely to change (e.g., daily, weekly). It doesn't guarantee crawl frequency.

Priority values (0.0 to 1.0) tell search engines the importance of a page relative to other pages on your own site.

You should include all canonical, high-quality pages that you want to appear in search results. Skip redirected or 'noindex' pages.

Submit the sitemap URL via Google Search Console in the 'Sitemaps' section.

No, it helps discovery, but search engines decide which pages to index based on content quality and other ranking factors.

It indicates the date the page content was last modified. Using current dates for unchanged content can be seen as manipulation.

This tool generates a standard URL sitemap. For images, you need specific <image:image> tags according to Google's Image Sitemap schema.