Question: What does "sitemap priority" mean and how can it be implemented?

"Sitemap priority" refers to an attribute in the XML Sitemap that provides search engines with information regarding the importance of a specific URL relative to other URLs on the same website. This value is represented on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest priority.

However, Google announced in 2022 that they no longer consider the priority hint in sitemaps, so setting it may not have a noticeable impact on your page’s crawling or indexing.

Despite this, if you wish to include the priority attribute for other search engines, here's how you could do it:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <priority>1.0</priority>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog</loc>
      <priority>0.5</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

In this example, the homepage is given the highest priority (1.0), while the blog page has a lower priority (0.5).

Please note: assigning high priority to all pages defies the purpose of prioritization. The concept of priority is to help search engines distinguish more important pages from lesser ones.