Posted by on June 20th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO - Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized |
Search engine optimization, or SEO, can be much trickier than you thought. The SEO process, as we all know, may give your website an apparently squeaky clean look to be able to stand out in the competitive search engine playing field. Optimizing your website gives you a ton of benefits that your site can harness to attract online traffic. In order to do this, SEOs should provide a website all the necessary tools to rank better in major search engines and attract more visitors. Definitely, a website needs attractive titles with commonly searched keywords, H1 to H3 tags, meta tags, interesting high quality content, and smooth site navigation or layout.
However, there are situations when these elements won’t be giving optimal results. It may be possible that the site is still not able to attract more incoming traffic that it is supposed to do. In this case, your site may still be lacking the necessary fundamentals that are needed before it can fully benefit from search engine optimization. The following sections will guide you through several basic aspects of your site that you have to scrutinize.
The Need for More Quality Content
Before anything else, your website should be carefully well-planned when it comes to site content. Content is one of the biggest determinants of SEO success. To make sure that your site is prepared for an SEO campaign, you have to fill your site with great content. And when we say great content, it means that you have the responsibility of giving the site fresh high quality content that can attract a reader’s interest and more importantly, a search engine’s attention. This requires constant effort; you have to update your site with unique content regularly. You have to focus on quality and quantity. This will surely get a search engine’s attention.
Search Engine Friendly Content Management Systems
Your site should be able to receive all the content its needs without difficulty and in an organized manner so that it can get picked up and indexed by search engines such as Google. You can only do this if your website has organization among its various pages. Using a content management system will certainly help. A content management system, or CMS, enables a user to crank out content and deliver content to a site efficiently and effectively so that it gets noticed by a search engine. It makes the pages within your site search engine friendly by adding permalinks or search engine friendly URLs. A CMS also allows you to edit or modify a URL to reflect the keywords in your title or topic.
There are available content management systems out there, such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, all of which allow you to assign tags or tag clouds to your posts. In turn, this will enable you to establish categories within your site in which to organize your content. Also, using a CMS permits you to control a title tag and meta content description of your pages.
Fixing Internal Navigation Issues
A content management system, as described above, can help you avoid several internal navigation problems you might encounter. If you don’t have this tool, your pages would scatter all over your site, leaving your site disorganized especially if your site has tons of material. It would give search engine crawlers more difficult time to index your site. As a result, your site would not be recognized and ranked by a search engine properly.
Also, aside from a CMS, you can use Xenu to help you solve internal navigation problems. Xenu, or Xenu’s Link Sleuth, is a link-checking software that can help you verify your entire website for broken hyperlinks. It provides you a detailed overview of your website’s internal linking structure and diagnoses any problems related to it. This will surely help you fix your site’s broken internal link so you can create a new XML sitemap that you can submit to Google and help your site get indexed by the search engine properly.
One Homepage Policy
It is important that a search engine like Google can only find your website in one location. It is possible that your site can be in multiple locations or URLs. However, it would give your site some SEO problems if you are not careful with establishing your home page URL appropriately.
For instance, your site home page can be usually seen in http://www.mywebsite.com. However, you can also type in mywebsite.com without the preceding WWW in the address bar and your same home page will also appear. Actually, there can be other ways to type in your URL, like adding a trailing slash or none, among many others:
http://www.mywebsite.com
http://mywebsite.com
http://www.mywebsite.com/index.html
http://mywebsite.com/index.html
http://www.mywebsite.com/index.htm
http://mywebsite.com/index.htm
http://www.mywebsite.com/default.asp
http://mywebsite.com/default.asp
Ideally, all of these URLs will all lead to the same home page. However, even if it seems that they lead you to one place, there’s a problem with how the address bar and search engines interpret them. For instance, if you key in your URL mywebsite.com without the WWW and you are lead to your site, there’s a possibility that what appears in the address bar is still the non-WWW version of your URL. Now there lies the problem.
A search engine reads URLs very literally and does not make any distinction with how you type in a URL. Search engines consider the given links above as different pages since the URLs are different, even if they seem to all work out to point to the same page. Without doing any corrections, you now have multiple duplicate pages on your site. Search engines would interpret it as different sites with link and thus, splitting up all the link juice and PageRank values which would be more effective if focused on one site.
To solve this issue, you need to be prepared for the possibility that multiple URLs can be used to direct to your site. First, you have to select your preferred primary URL for your site. The preferred URL for a homepage is www.mywebsite.com. Then ensure that every variation of the URL ends up leading to your primary URL and uses the same URL structure. For the Google search engine, you can do this using the Tools section of Google’s Webmaster Central, where you can assign your preferred URL.
Next, you need to setup 301 redirects for those URL variations. There are other ways of redirects to other URLS that are not your primary, like JavaScript or meta redirects, but they could give you more complications. Using 301 redirects is the surest and safest method for the SEO process. A 301 redirect is permanent and maintains search engine rankings. It also passes the search engine ranking score of the URL variation to your primary URL, helping your main URL appear and gradually rank in search engine results pages. Lastly, you should also check your site navigation to make sure that your internal links will also point to your primary URL.
When it comes to choosing your URL, it’s up to you how your URL looks like. You can opt for either the www or the non-www version, to have trailing slash or none, and opt for any top-level domain (albeit .com is the most commonly used). The important thing is to designate one and be consistent with it.
The Importance of a Smooth Link Structure, Site Architecture, and Hierarchy
To make the most out of your SEO efforts, you should also consider how your site is built and how you design your site’s navigation. How you lay your foundations like a website’s architecture and its overall linking structure will also determine the success of your website and your business bottom line. If your website is confusing to navigate, you will lose visitors. Not only that, search engine spiders will also have a difficult time crawling over your pages. Therefore, this will hurt your site’s search engine rankings badly, since the way your links are structured is also given significant weight aside from the anchor texts present within your pages.
Building Your Site like a Silo
It is important to make sure that your site structure makes sense, meaning that your website allows all your visitors to find what they need conveniently and search engine to index all your pages properly. Make sure that your site navigation is search engine friendly as well.
The best way to optimize your site, make it more search engine friendly, and attract more targeted visitors is to establish a solid website architecture, or a “silo website architecture.” Silo structured websites will surely give your site the needed boost in the search engine results pages.
A silo—for this discussion—simply means “category” or categorizing. Silo architecture is a vertical page linking design that organizes your content into structured themes while the content of each page, including titles, headers, and URLs, all synergize to reinforce the overall theme of your site. It is the method of linking your pages and designing your site so that all major search engines can be easily drawn to your site. Through this structure, you create distinct sections for each category that are all related to the overall site’s theme. Cross-linking between silos or categories should be designed in such a way that links lead to the landing pages of other silos if your content contains keywords or anchor texts that reinforce those silos’ themes.
The silo architecture has been proven to boost your search engine rankings because the way how your pages are linked to your home page and vice versa gives your pages more link juice, telling search engines that they are important. It signals search engines the overall theme and significance of your site while providing a convenient navigation for your visitors.
When you carefully plan your site’s navigation from the very beginning, your site will be able to rank better with less effort and address a specific topic of interest, therefore attracting more visitors.
