When a site is first optimized, SEOs have to decide which keyphrases to target. The keyphrases need to bring in a significant amount of traffic and typically need to generate sales. This is not an easy feat, and first guesses are often wrong.

By submitting a Google sitemap, webmasters can get extra information that will help refine the keyphrases a site is targeting. Under the statistics tab in sitemaps, webmasters can choose to view “query stats.” Here, Google displays the top twenty queries a site is showing up for in search and the listing’s rank. For small sites, some unexpected results might appear that is not visible in web logs or web analytics programs. Listings could be showing deeper in Google’s results pages and not generating clicks. For these keyphrases, rewriting html titles, creating a new web page, or getting links with the keyphrases in the linking text could move a listing from the 30th position to the first page. By changing (or adding to) the list of keyphrases being targeting, new listings could start showing higher and generating traffic to previously unseen pages.

The same methodology for generating new traffic is generally used by analyzing web logs, but Google Sitemaps adds a little extra by showing listings that aren’t necessarily generating clicks. To learn more about Google Sitemaps and to generate your own sitemaps, check out Pure Visibility’s Google Sitemaps tool.