SEO for 2016: The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide (2015)

Chapter 11. Targeting More Than One Keyword

Most web sites selling anything need to target more than a single keyword. Even if you just sell a single product or service. So what do you do to promote your web site and focus on many keywords since many of the major search engines only allow a web page to be relevant for three keywords.

The answer is a simple one but the execution is about the most complex of any part of your web site’s code. The answer is that you need to create a perfectly optimized landing page for every single keyword you want to focus on. You then have to have the search engines index all those additional pages separately as separate landing pages. This is the tough part. Even the singular and the plural version of your keywords need to be focused on other pages.

To be found by Google for all the different pages on your website you need to have a site map to tell the search engines the landing pages you want to index. Not just any, there is a standard called Sitemap protocol 0.90 which Google requires along with Google's many updated requirements.

WARNINGS: There are so many web sites and web developers on the Internet that claim they can create a sitemap. Many just create pages with links and call them a sitemap. Also, there has been many updates to the Sitemap Protocol and many web sites still push older versions. I highly recommend that if you are not a professional developer you go to a trusted source such as SMMaker.com or SMCreator.com and have them professionally create and install a Sitemap for your web site.

In this chapter I am going to tell you how to make a Sitemap specially formulated to Google and Bing. And then how to tell Google and Bing where to look for your site map. As you saw from the warning above, it is a lot of work to create a site map and test it to see if it is working.

You can make one yourself, pay a website to make you a sitemap, or if you use WordPress you can download one of over a hundred plugins that will not only create a Site Map but also keep it up to date with changes.

So let’s take a look at how to create a site map.

Sitemaps XML format

Informing search engine crawlers of your different pages is the job of your Site Map. This document describes the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol. The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

The Sitemap must include the following:

· Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.

· Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag.

· Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.

· Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

All of the other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine's documentation for details. For Google you must include this tag:

Let’s look at an example which shows a Sitemap that contains just a single URL:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<url>

<loc>http://www.WebSEOPros.com/</loc>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

</url>

</urlset>

All XML Tags

Here are all the tags that can be used in your site map and their syntaxes and descriptions.

<urlset> (required)

Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.

<url> (required)

Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.

<loc> (required)

URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2,048 characters.

<lastmod> (optional)

The date of last modification of the file. This date should be in W3C Date/time format. This format allows you to omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-DD.

<changefreq> (optional)

How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page.

Valid syntaxes are:

· always

· hourly

· daily

· weekly

· monthly

· yearly

· never

<priority> (optional)

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers.

NOTE: The default priority of a page is 0.5.

The priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.

WARNING: Assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.

Here is an example using the different tags:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<url>

<loc>http://www.WebSEOPros.com</loc>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http://www.WebSEOPros.com/seo-pricelist.php</loc>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http://www.WebSEOPros.com/SEO.php</loc>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http:// www.WebSEOPros.com/SEM.php</loc>

</url>

</urlset>

Saving your Site Map

Search engines know to look for a plain text site map at the root directory of your website where your Index page resides.

It should be named “Sitemap.xml”

It should be accessible using your site URL. As an example.

http://www.WebSEOPros.com/Sitemap.xml

You can submit a sitemap using a port number. If you submit a Sitemap using a path with a port number, you must include that port number as part of the path in each URL listed in the Sitemap file. For instance, if your

Sitemap is located at:

http://www. www.WebSEOPros.com:100/sitemap.xml

Then each URL listed in the Sitemap must begin with:

http:// www.WebSEOPros.com:100

Submit Your Site Map to Google and Bing

You can submit your website’s site map URL to both Google and Bing. To do this go to the following websites and login with the Google and Bing ID’s you created earlier in the book.

For Google go to:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

(Go to Site configuration, click Sitemaps)

For Bing.com go to:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Where to go for more information

For more information on how to configure a site map visit:

http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsd

There are a number of tools available to help you validate the structure of your Sitemap based on this schema. You can find a list of XML-related tools at the following websites:

http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#Tools

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/13/schematools.html