Getting Pages Indexed That Are Not In The Main Navigation

[PatBausemer]

Hi All,

Hoping you can help me out with a couple of questions I have. I am looking to create SEO friendly landing pages optimized for long tail keywords to increase site traffic and conversions. These pages will not live on the main navigation.

I am wondering what the best way to get these pages indexed is? Internal text linking, adding to the sitemap? What have you done in this situation?

I know that these pages cannot be orphaned pages and they need to be linked to somewhere. Looking for some tips to do this properly and to ensure that they can become indexed.

Thanks!

Pat

[KristinaKledzik]

Yep, that'll work!

[PatBausemer]

Hi Kristina,

Thanks for the help! I have a question around your second bullet point. So our TLD is rapid7.com. Right now we have pages that are rapid7.com/product/etc. I was thinking that these long tail seo pages would just be something like www.rapid7.com/long-tail-keyword/. Does this make sense or are you saying that this should be done differently?

Thanks again!

Pat

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Pat,

You're right on track: you should get those long tail optimized landing pages indexed by linking to them from your already-indexed webpages and by submitting an XML sitemap to Google and Bing. And, of course, external links are a plus in any situation.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Those internal links should use the long tail keywords you're targeting as the linking text
• Make sure to fit these new pages into the existing URL structure, but don't add too many subdirectories. If you use the URL www.website.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/long-tail-keyword, the keyword in the URL won't be nearly as helpful for rankings.
• It might help to submit a sitemap to Google that only includes those long tail keywords. Google Webmaster Tools will give you the number of URLs in your sitemap and the number of those URLs that are indexed but won't specifically tell you which URLs aren't indexed. If you submit a sitemap with just long tail keyword pages, you'll be able to quickly see approximately how many of your long tail optimized pages are indexed.

Good luck!

Kristina