PAS Template & SITE MAP question

**Brokerstar** · 08-25-2011, 04:45 AM

Hey guys as many of you know I have a PAS site Free Poker Training Videos | Poker Lessons | Poker School

I'm really working on the SEO side of things recently with adding social media plugins, optimizing my pages, bookmarking, all sorts.

Now I'm looking at the site map. I hear that Google loves site maps. I'm using the PAS CMS and I have what is known as site map. html which is here Site Map and I also have site map. xml.

Are both of these meant to mirror each other? I have just opened the sitmap. html for the first time ever and seen that it's pretty empty, is the html version what google is looking for?

When I go to google webmaster tools it asks me to upload the xml version although I'm not 100% sure I have the xml version right as you have to change the formatting of the links, for example:

http:// www .tagpoker.co.uk/outer_pages/articles/ holdem_manager_stats .html

Becomes:

<url>
<loc>{{ tld }}/pages/articles/holdem-manager-stats.php</loc>
</url>

(or does it? is that even right?)

Sorry if some of these things seem really school boy easy but I have focused the last couple of years just really on content and not so much optimization and now I want to make the most out of what I have.

Thanks in advance for any help

Broker

**Brokerstar** · 08-25-2011, 05:45 AM

I've been doing some more homework on the subject and it looks like I can enter my newly created URL's as they are rather than changing them to php format? like the example below, is that right?

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>

<lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>

<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

</url>

**JohnG** · 08-25-2011, 09:51 AM

Hey Brokerstar!

I'm glad that you are working on your site; ask away and I'll do what I can to help.

Sitemaps were more important in yesteryear than they are today, because crawlers weren't nearly as good as they are now. Sometimes they simply couldn't find a page on your site for a myriad of technical limitations (too many links, can't traverse certain HTML menus). Ideally you'd like the XML and HTML versions to both contain all the pages you want indexed, but if you can only update one of them then just pick what would be easier (usually XML as there are many PHP scripts to kick out sitemaps). The important thing with a HTML sitemap is that you need a link to it somewhere on your site (probably in the footer, or in the robots.txt); right now I don't see one.

The link in the XML sitemap can be in whatever legal format, as long as that URL will get to the correct place. However, you're going to want to put canonical tags in your <head> because it looks like there are several formats that resolve to the same thing. You probably have duplicate content issues. The link example you posted in your follow-up looks correct.

It looks like you have roughly 950 pages indexed in Google.

The things that jump out to me:

URL structure. Use dashes instead of underscores. Ancient article but still holds true.
URL keywords. "http://www.tagpoker.co.uk/outer_pages/articles/5000_4.html" There are a LOT of URLs like this that should really change. You'd be surprised how much traffic the deep areas of your site can collect just by making descriptive URLs/Title/Description. Even if you gave that article a title/url/description/h1 including the words "interesting poker", you could probably get a share of the ~100 searches per month on that term. You have a lot of great content that isn't working very hard for you right now.
ALT tags on your images.
You made profile links to your site. That's good! Change the anchor text to the word(s) you want to rank higher for rather than the url.
Think about hosting your videos on a YouTube channel and pull them into your site. YouTube is actually the 2nd largest search engine. This is another way to make your existing content perform better for you, but this can require a lot of work.
Put your share options in the main navigation on top of your page, similar to YPC. Just by putting them in a more prominent place you can greatly increase their usage.

Those are just some of directions I think you can take it. You have a great site, and with some work it can only get better. Feel free to ask me anything.

**Brokerstar** · 08-26-2011, 08:35 AM

So is there a way for me to re build the links and create a new page with the old content and somehow make it so the old links re direct to the new page and I don't loose page rank etc?

Also what do you mean about ALT tags for me images?

Thanks a lot for your help.

Broker

**JohnG** · 08-26-2011, 10:04 AM

I'll have to think on this one a little bit after looking at how you have things set up (rebuilding pages so-as not to lose inbound links). The PAS CMS is fantastic for quickly setting up a site, but it wasn't designed to handle major link reconstruction. It's possible, and I'll get back to you in a few days with the best solution.

The images are a simpler fix:

In the image tag: <img src="http://publisher.pokeraffiliatesolutions.com/images/offers/XXXX.gif" alt="SHORT DESCRIPTION OF IMAGE">

EDIT: Also make the filename of the image somewhat descriptive.

Not only does this help signify to the search engines what your image/page is about, people can find your site through search engine image search. For example, there are hundreds of searches per month for "poker graphs". Note there's even an area where it pulls the google images into the main search results.

**Brokerstar** · 08-26-2011, 10:32 AM

Thanks again for your input.

I've quickly created another couple of pages just now with the new link structure after reading the article you posted and obviously what you said.

Calling station & Free Online Poker Coaching

How much of an impact would you roughly estimate this may actually of been having on search results. I have to admit that I'm really curious as the majority of my traffic does not come through search engines finding my content at all.

Kind regards

broker

**JohnG** · 08-26-2011, 11:13 AM

It completely depends on the volume of the terms, and what those terms are worth to you. Some terms bring in a lot of traffic but may not convert. An example of this is poker celebrities: lots of interest but low conversion. On some of our properties, low traffic terms/pages may not bring in a lot of volume but will convert very well. One thing I would suggest in the calling station article is to include more calls to action sprinkled in with links to more of your pages. Keep the users engaged once they are there, and some of those other pages are designed to entice them to sign up through you.

You can actually do the analysis yourself. Take a peek in the keyword tool at relative volumes for terms before making an article. After publishing the article, track the keywords you targeted using SEOBooks rank checker. In Google Analytics, you can see how many clicks come in through those pages and where they are coming from. In Google's webmaster tools, you can see the impressions around those terms. If you're getting a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks, that means you need to improve your meta description to entice people to click on your result as opposed to someone else's (hint: stupid outrageous promises and/or drama get lots of clicks). After a few releases of these, you'll get a feel for what will rank and what won't. There's a ton more that goes into it (like competitive research), but I'll write an article on that some other time.

For someone like yourself who seems to be a content generating machine, it's mostly important right now that you generate proper link/meta/title/H1 structure just so you're in the running for terms. My guess is that you could increase traffic rather substantially, though it'll be time consuming to circle back to a lot of these pages.

**Brokerstar** · 08-26-2011, 11:24 AM

So much as PAS is really invaluable to me but I have to say that having someone like you not only point out what's wrong but then give actual and practical steps on how to correct it is just unreal.

I've been searching the web like crazy the last couple of weeks to look at ways to improve my search results and you have given so much to get on with in a few short posts.

Thank you very much sir.

I've just looked in Google webmaster tools and seen that I get 2500 page impressions for the term 'heads up poker' and only 22 clicks. Off to change the meta description now.

Thanks again.

Broker

**JohnG** · 08-26-2011, 11:46 AM

So much as PAS is really invaluable to me but I have to say that having someone like you not only point out what's wrong but then give actual and practical steps on how to correct it is just unreal.

When our publishers win, we win too.

I've just looked in Google webmaster tools and seen that I get 2500 page impressions for the term 'heads up poker' and only 22 clicks. Off to change the meta description now.

Nice! One thing I forgot to mention: make sure you still use the keyword in your drama filled description. The search engines bold the search terms for a reason: people scan the page looking for their exact search. Getting a higher click through rate is KEY for ranking higher in Google.

EDIT to include your update to the description: "Amazing heads up poker strategy secrets revealed in videos guaranteed to improve your game and get you making more money in online poker."

So sweet, and exactly what you should do.

It'll take Google awhile to get this new description up to date. It'll take Bing 3-5x as long.

**Brokerstar** · 08-27-2011, 03:20 AM

Why do I get the feeling that if I had simply put 5 pages of written content up a day for the last three years that I would have 100 x the visits that I do now? ha ha

A couple of questions if I may:

1) What is a realistic conversion rate from impressions to clicks? I can imagine there are many factors but something like 1-4% etc? I have no idea what a realistic expectation should be.

2) With the new articles that I put up, given that my site is a few years old and quite large will it be enough to link to my new content from other pages with in my site to get them started or do you think each article will need external links pointing to them in order to rank?

3) This kind of follows off of my last question but I can realistically write 4 or 5 unique articles a day. With this in mind how would you use that content? would you put it all on my main site?, most of it on and give some away to other web masters with embedded links (if so what kind of %), or would you keep some and submit the rest to directories?

4) I've also realized that I have a huge amount of solid strategy on my site already but not many pages ranking well for certain terms so what I was thinking of doing was creating feeder pages to rank for terms that then navigate people to more great content but in a fitting way.

For example let's say I want to try and rank for 'Learn Poker Online' I quickly just threw this page together to do just that http://www.tagpoker.co.uk/articles/l...er-online.html but with in that page there is clearly advice but also points them to more hard hitting strategy such as the videos, more articles etc.

What are your thoughts on that as a strategy to go along with writing more direct content too?

Many thanks

Broker

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