Our SEO Sitemap course shows you how to begin structuring your website hierarchy and allocate your key phrases into your web pages most effectively.

Following on from our SEO Keyword Research module, our SEO Sitemap course is in many ways our most important online class. Planning for the allocation of key phrases into your page titles, meta descriptions and heading tags is crucial to get right - both in the short term (as your website is gradually indexed and ranked), and in the mid to long-term (as changing your SEO later can have unpredictable and undesirable results).

During this process we compile a series of spreadsheets with your chosen key phrases categorised into groups. Your main spreadsheet will contain your most important key phrases, allocated to your homepage and other top level pages, along with their filenames, page titles and meta descriptions. Subsequent spreadsheets will house key phrases to be used for your blog pages, about page, case studies and so forth. To some degree, we have found it is wise to allow discovered key phrases to dictate their own content. It is often not until one begins the process of keyword research that one discovers there are many key phrases related to your business that you hadn't even thought of. We compile these second and third-tier key phrases into the relevant groups, so that nothing is wasted.

In the case of your most important, primary key phrases, we also record attendant information that will keep us focused on those phrases that are most crucial, and to that end, we usually create a spreadsheet which contains to following additional data (thank you to the gurus at Moz for highlighting this approach):

• Key-phrase Search Volume - How many people search for this phrase every month (the higher the volume, the better).
• Difficulty - How much competition already exists for this key-phrase, and therefore how difficult will it be to achieve a good ranking for it.
• Organic CTR (click through ratio) - The percentage of how many people click a link containing your chosen key-phrase, against how often the key-phrase is actually displayed by the search engine (the higher the percentage, the better).
• Business Value - How useful the key-phrase actually is for your business.
• Priority: Set your own priority for this key-phrase.
• SERP Types: The types of information displayed when searching for this key-phrase e.g. o (organic) p (paid ads) img (images) shp (shopping) vid (videos) mps (maps) etc.

Once all of this information has been entered, we begin planning the structure of your website, paying close attention to the issue of hierarchy, allocating key phrases to 'folders' of web site content so that Google (or indeed any search engine) can fully understand how your content is categorised. Finally, and if required, a series of blog posts are planned out, during which a strategy usually emerges as to how your blog posts can best support the SEO your are employing on your website, and how better these posts may serve your SEO needs in the future.