Getting to Page One of Google

Chapter 1 LandersWeb.com SEO – Google SiteMap

Jun 7, 2009 Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0

This is the first day of my SEO campaign for LandersWeb.com. As mentioned in the last post, I am already Number 1 in Google search of “Web Maintenance Portland” which is nice and shows that META tags work, but how many people actually type that in their Google search? Looking at my Statistics program, not many. So I have set a much loftier goal which is to get on Page One of Google when searcing for “Professional Web Maintenance“. There are over 27 million results on that search, how great would that be and how much traffic would that bring my site? Stay tuned.

Each day I am going to apply an SEO strategy to improve the Google placement of LandersWeb.com, I encourage you to follow along and work with me as we get our sites on Page One.

Using Google Optmization and Analysis tools, classic SEO techniques and leveraging WEB 2.0 tools and websites, I will work to my goal of getting on Page One of Google. Each article will begin by mentioning what I plan on doing and discuss how I am going to go about it.

Day 1 Plan
My first task is to put together a Google Site Map. Looking at my Google WebMaster tools, that appears to be the first logical step in SEO. This post will discuss the creation of a sitemap for LandersWeb.com. I’ll be back in an hour to finish this post.

Day 1 results
Ok, I’m back, that was a fairly easy task, a few comments though. There are several free SiteMap creation tools out there, I can see some value if you have a huge site, but they don’t handle how often your content changes that well so I created my own. Here is an example node in the XML –

<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>

This is for the front page, the important part here is the changefreq node. It is very important that you let Google know how often to expect this page to change. This is my front page, I change it daily using a tool I built where I can login to my Admin Panel, select the page and make changes to it. I’ll be writing an article about this tool I created and if interested email me to discuss and a demo. Changing content is key to Google placement, this tool I built will come in handy in quickly updating content and addding content throughout my site.

Currently my website is a sleek 10 pages but it will be growing as I add Web 2.0 information and articles that will assist my clients at the Google SEO game.

Below is my complete Sitemap and I have just submitted it to Google, they say it will take a few hours to index. It seems a bit backward that I did not go in and optimize my pages for the search term “Professional Web Maintenance” but I wanted to get the sitemap uploaded to Google. I did add that keyword to my front page and a few other pages. Tomorrow I’ll be working on more keyword optimization of my pages.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″ xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd”>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/testimonials_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/MicrosoftDotNet_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/SEO_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/webdesign_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/webdevelopment_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/webhosting_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/Security_Secunia_page.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/default.aspx</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.landersweb.com/WordPress</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>