SEO : Creating a Search Engine Friendly Structure

Our goal is to create a big net to catch as many suitable fish as possible.

As our 'net' is made of pages and keywords, we will have to write more, not less.

Wiki-style

When we search for anything these days Wikipedia and other large content collections invariably comes out high in the search results. Why? This is because of the volume of content which is optimized into many, many pages, each with their own individual keyphrase and keyphrase-rich content.

If Wikipedia were writing about Widgets, they would not write just one page. There would be at least 20 pages, because the subject would be broken out into 20 sub-topics, all linked together.

Go visit www.wikipedia.org and search for anything you know about, then examine the structure of the pages. Then think about how our own website content could be split out into more content pages.

Example

Let's imagine that we are The Widget Company who sell red, green and blue widgets.
We are creating a widget website where people can hopefully find us and buy our widgets.

What kind of structure would we normally create? Well, usually something like this:

This is OK, but there's not much keyword-specific content for the spider to crawl.

In order to attract our widget-buying audience we want to be found under the following keywords:

widget dimensions
widget [type]
widget news
widget reviews
about widgets

So we're going to change things a little, so that:

1. There are more content pages, split into levels.
   
   
2. Each sub level will have its own main page, which in turn is linked up to the next level.
   
   

like this:

3. The third and most important part of this strategy is making sure that all the content on a particular page is geared up to promote the keyphrase contained in its filename:

• each page has the keyphrase in the title tag
• each page has the keyphrase first in the keywords meta tag
• each page has the keyphrase first in the description meta tag
  
  
• each page has the keyphrase as a H1 heading on the page
• each page has the keyphrase several times in the <p> page text
  
  
• each page has the keyphrase in comment text
• each page has the keyphrase as alt text for images
  
  
• each page links to the other pages using the destination page keyphrase as the link
  text (eg. about-red-widgets.html contains a link to buy-red-widgets.html using the link
  text "buy red widgets")
  
  

(further details about the above methods can be found in the Pages section)

Get the idea?

If a spider arrives at a page with the file name "green-widget.asp", AND finds "green widget" in the title, AND "green widget" in the meta tags, AND "green widget" in image descriptions and comments, AND "green widget" all through the body copy and in link text.... it's going to form the opinion that the page is all about....."green widgets". And guess what: it is!

This is a classic example of the crawler and the crawled wanting to achieve the same goal, and being of the same mind.

Search engines contain rules written by people, and the people decided that "If the keyword is found in the title and these other places, then award the page X points"). As our page ticks all the boxes it will be scored highly.

And later when our searcher looks for a "green widget" the search engine will think our page is lot more topic-focused and appropriate than any other page on green widgets, and rank us higher than the competition. And the search result will show a contextual snippet containing the keyphrase.

Likewise other green widget fans will link to the green widget page, again increasing our popularity rating.

How many sub pages and sections should we create? The larger the net, the more fish we can catch. We should start with at least 5, but can grow to 50, or more. The most important thing is that each page is not too similar to any other. If we simply copy and paste text from one page to another, then change one link, that is too similar. Search engines will actually penalize our site for "spamming" their database. Do my pages need to be different to the others? Yes, this is very important. The easiest way to make sure each page is substantially different is to write entirely different copy for each page, based on its keyphrase, eg. red-widgets.html is ONLY about red widgets ie. what red widgets look like, what they do... red-widget-news.html is ONLY about the news on red widgets ie. who is using red widgets, where they are being used... You should also change the order of certain elements - use different images in different places, change amount of copy on the page, change some content to left, others to right, etc.

Do... Make sure your file structure is as FLAT as possible (ie. 2 tier) with everything linking from the home page (more chance of being indexed). Go to 3 levels only if you have to. The closer the fish swims to the surface, the greater the chance of being caught by the fisherman. Use a global footer to manage internal and external links quickly & easy, and keep your site looking consistent. Put all your links in one file, then call them from the site pages as an include. (If you're unsure how to do this check with your webhost or search 'server-side include'.) Add new pages every month. Search engines like new and updated content. This tells them the site is active, growing, and wants to be popular... which is the kind of content they want to serve to their users (as opposed to stagnant, old sites that never change). Update your sitemap after adding new pages, and upload to the server. Regularly track which pages are getting the most traffic, and do a search on Google for site:mywebsite.com to see all pages that have been indexed.

Don't... just copy existing pages and give them a different name. Search engines hate duplicate content and this may cause them to penalize your site or drop it from the rankings completely. go off and create 100 pages in one go. Add new ones at the rate of 5 or 10 a month, and track what works and what doesn't. This also gives the impression to the search engine that your site is growing.