How do I get google to index the right pages with the right key word?

[ursalesguru]

Hello I notice that even though I have a site map google is indexing the wrong pages under the wrong key words. As a result its not as relevant and is not ranking properly.

[danatanseo]

Hi ursalesguru. I'm not trying to be flippant, but man, if we all knew the answer to that question, none of us would be here.

It's a struggle. Search engine spiders like Googlebot are really stupid...no, really, they are. They can't see some of the obvious things that human beings can see when looking at a page. That's why SEOs spend so much time writing "alt" attributes, meta tags, <h>tags, transcribing videos, researching anchor text and building links and adding structured data as prescirbed by schema.org. All of this is an attempt to try to get search engines to see a page the way a human sees a page.</h>

Still, it's possible to get all that right and still lose. It requires time, patience and intelligent work. Our mutual frustration is one reason this forum is so gosh darned popular

Keep on keeping on. Learn, read, stay passionate. The rest will follow.

Dana

[ursalesguru]

To be a bit more specific. Instead of showing the page I want to show its actually ranking the sitemap page instead. The XML sitemap on page 1 lol.... I need the actual content to show....haha...

[danatanseo]

Ah I understand perfectly what are trying to accomplish. You can put attributes in your XML file that indicate to a search engine spider how important the page is, but there is absolutely no guarantee that bots will pay any attention to it. In fact, they could use that as a negative indicator and discount those pages instead.

It's similar to the attribute in an XML file that tells a search engine how often the page is update. Because these things are easy to manipulate, I can almost guarantee that Google ignores them.

There is only one way to achieve what you want: be the best page on the planet for the keywords you want to rank for. That means writing mind-blowingly good content and getting more inbound links of higher quality than anyone else.

I hope that helps and gets you where you want to be.

Dana

[ursalesguru]

So this will stop google from ranking my site map on the first page for key words I want to rank for versus the actual page listed in the ite map?