3 Part Series to become Well-versed in On-Page SEO – Part 1

The Right “Bone” Structure is Important

Are you an SEO Superstar?!

Creating a structure that works for the search engine spiders as well as your visitors is the ultimate balancing act. But if you ever want to lean to one side or the other ALWAYS lean to the side of giving the visitors an excellent experience.

So in other words build your site for people not automated robots and spiders. With that being said here are some structure principles to live by;

• Usability – Build your site for visitor usability and ease of use not just for spiders.

• Dynamic Linking, Anchor text and Reputation – When making sure the spiders can crawl the site with ease be sure to do that by having an internal dynamic linking strategy between the pages, using anchor text, that are the most important to you. So not all of the pages will matter if the spiders get to them i.e. about us, terms of use, privacy policy etc. Optimize for the pages that you choose to rise in rank and reputation and tell the search engines to leave the other pages alone.

• Page Penetration – Get as many pages ranking and being indexed on the search engines – the more that are on the engines the better = Page Penetration.

Per the above structure principles lets dig a little deeper into each one (Usability is Part One for now);

Usability

The main thing to consider when developing pages is keeping your keywords in mind as you design and develop a web page and content; however, be sure to also keep in mind that a human user looking for a product or information will be reading and looking at your web page.

So always make sure you write for the human users before you write for the search engines. I would rather err on the side of making sure that the words and information on the page allow the user to have a great experience than have the search engines find it, index it and have a user leave the page quickly because it doesn’t make sense from a user standpoint.

Top Level – Your Index/Home Page

This is the page most will see when they find your website therefore it needs to give them a “clean and clear” view of what your site is about and where they can go to get deeper information (second and third level)

So clean navigation and a clear overview is paramount to your success in keeping a new visitor on the site as well having them “click-though” to other pages and get deeper into the various levels on your site.

Second Level – Funnel/Category Page

This level of pages funnels the user down to specific categories of information or products (if it is an e-commerce site). Again this level should give a clean and clear message and where to go next. This level will boil it down so your user can find their product or information in the next click from this level.

Third Level – Information/Product Purchase Page

These are the content and product pages. These are the pages where action takes place for the user. A product can be purchased, an e-book can be read or downloaded or the information the user was searching for is found. Sometimes these pages can be accessed directly from the top-level homepage depending on how important or how popular the third level page is.

If you find a third level page getting accessed more than all of the other pages on your site you may want that direct link from the homepage to bring your users there without an extra second level stop over before allowing them access to the third page.

The third level in a lot of cases is deepest you will have to go on your site. If you do need to go deeper then there is a lot more work involved to get the deeper pages indexed and found by the search engines.

Watch for Parts 2 and 3 which will detail Dynamic Linking and Page Penetration…..