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Be the pigeon, not the statue

One clever SEO professional said sitemaps are the keys to the kingdom of well-performing keywords.

That website. You know the one. Top five in the SERPs, while your lame effort sits in eighth place. Eighth? You may as well be rated on a list stuck to the back of a truck driving through Ciudad Juarez at midnight.

As soon as you try to change strategies, that SOB might be right alongside, grabbing keywords and keeping you out of the high placement you deserve. Are you planning to fight back anytime soon, loser?

SEO ROI has a suggestion for you, and it has to do with sitemaps. These documents make it easier for search engines to understand your site's architecture.

Sitemaps also represent an unlocked safe full of money in front of an open window. Why give away keyword information in those sitemaps when you can protect it with a little effort?

Here’s how to do competitive keyword intelligence for free.

Look at their site maps. Every valuable page on their site will be linked to from there, with desirable anchor text.

The major search engines encourage sitemaps as a webmaster aid. With a well-defined sitemaps file in place, search spiders should crawl them more effectively.

You want that effectiveness too, but preferably without leaving your site open to the next clever person who knows to look for your sitemap.

What to do? SEO ROI's Gabriel Goldenberg suggested a method to the madness of throwing people off the trail:

If you must have a Site Map on your site to submit one to the SEs, then this is where breaking usability convention is allowed. By all means hide it 5 clicks/folders deep and with misleading anchor text like “ugly fat bearded ladies.” Oh, and each folder should have 5 folders, each of them titled something really helpful, like 1,2,3,4,5. So to get to the site map, the person would have to know the “combination” to your “folder lock” e.g. 4-2-5-4-1. Bonus points for doing this all in Ajax so that they can’t use the URL to locate themselves unless they finally reach the site map.

This won't help much against competitors who have the help of an effective SEO firm or a dedicated in-house resource, but it may give you enough of an edge to help find a niche where you can place well in the search results and profit from that.