Archive for the 'Site Structure' category

Site Structure – A Living Example

May 28 2010 Published by under Site Structure

I’ve posted a living example of how to implement a site structure that focuses PageRank to your Tier 1 pages.  Use the link below.

Vermont Search Engine Optimization

Please note that I haven’t included any content yet so that you can see the layout in its most basic form.

All of the links at the top of the page are tagged with a “nofollow” so that the search engine spiders won’t pass page rank through those links.

All of the links at the bottom of the page do NOT have the “nofollow” tag.  As such, we are passing page rank to those pages.

Notice that the links at the bottom of the page use the keywords that we are trying to rank for as the link to the new page in the site structure.  This helps with our page reputation and helps the search engines understand what content is on the page.

Now, we have to go back through our pages and write content for each page.  Fun!

Next time we’ll have a brief discussion about content generation and some simple things you’ll need to get the most out of your copy writing.

Please feel free to post any questions.

Enjoy

-Jeff

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Content Mapping – Attaching Keyword Groups to a Site Structure

May 21 2010 Published by under Keyword Research, Site Structure

Today we’re going to connect our keyword groups with one of the site structures that we discussed previously.

There are hundreds of site structures that you can use to optimize your website for the search engines, but today I’m going to show you my favorite.

With this structure, we’ll used the concept of stacked pyramids and adjust the linking between the tiers for maximum effect on our keywords.

Start by arranging your keyword groups by theme.  With my keyword set I have 3 main themes that focus around “Optimization”, “Marketing”, and “SEO”

I start by taking the most competitive group from each theme and placing it under the home page to create our tier 1 pages.

Group 1 is around the them of Optimization, 2 – Marketing, 3 – SEO

Tier 1 of Site Structure

My home page will like to each of these groups using text that gives reputation to the page by including the main keyword or keywords as the actual hyperlink.

NOTE:  This site structure is for search engine spiders only.  There will be other links on the homepage that use a “nofollow” tag in the link for visitor navigation.

Notice that our Group 1-3 pages do NOT link back to the homepage.  Linking back to the home page will cause your PageRank to pool at the homepage.  If you have one set of HIGHLY competitive terms that you are trying to rank for, then place those on the homepage and return links from each page in your site structure back to the homepage.

Moving on, I’ll now take the less competitive terms from each theme and place them under the main grouping from that theme.

Tier 2

Now with this tier we will want to point links back to the most competitive group in each them to pool our PageRank on our tier 1 pages.

What we have here are 3 separate pyramid shapes under the home page.  The pyramids do NOT connect to each other preserving reputation and page rank in each individual theme.

If you remember back to our keyword groupings, I discussed creating a second group that switched the modifier terms with your main keywords.  What I do now, is take our structure and double it and then link the sub-group tier 1 pages to the main-group tier 2 pages and vice versa.  It ends up looking like this.

Final Structure

You can see that the tier 1 pages still do not link to each other, and likewise with the tier 2 pages.  We’ve just cross linked our tier 1 and 2 sub-group pages to each other.

Group 1 links to: G5, G5.5, G6, G6.5
Group 1.5 links to the same tier 2 pages.

Over the weekend I’ll work on implementing this site structure on my actual website so you’ll have a living example to look at shortly.

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Keyword Research – Organizing Landing Pages

May 19 2010 Published by under Keyword Research, Site Structure

I’m assuming by now that you’ve completed the competition analysis from your keyword list generated by following the instructions in my previous posts on keyword research.

Now we need to organize this research into small groups of 3-5 keywords.  Each group will eventually become a webpage inside our website.

I usually start by making a new tab on my spreadsheet where I’ll begin to cut and paste keywords.  This allows me to keep my original data for later reference.

We’ll use this list of keywords as a working example:

[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont small business seo]
[vermont seo strategy]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine marketing service]
[vermont search engine submission service]
[vermont targeted website traffic]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

We want to start by looking for terms that share words.  In this case, “search engine optimization” seems to be common to the first few terms, so let’s break those out first:

Group 1

[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

Group 2

[small business seo]
[seo strategy]
[search engine marketing service]
[search engine submission service]
[targeted website traffic]

As you can see I took every term with “search engine optimization” and put it into Group 1 while leaving the remaining terms in Group 2.

Now we need to take a look at our competition.  Are our keywords highly competitive?  If so, we need to have a narrow focus on our groupings to target those terms.  If we are less competitive, we can pull the modifiers from the term and proceed forward.

In my example, the search terms are not highly competitive.  So I’ll continue by taking any words following “vermont search engine optimization” and tag them as modifiers for the group.

Group 1

Modifiers: firm, specialist, marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]

Now we’re left with one search term in our grouping.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Now I can go back and pick the most competitive modifiers and bring them back into the group.

Group 1

Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]

From here I like to write a potential title tag for my grouping.  Since Google only displays 65 characters of your title tag, it’s good to keep your title length to 65 characters.  If you don’t you’ll end up with annoying “…” following your title in the search results.

Title: Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist

Perfect, we come in at 59 characters.  I’ll explain later the art of writing title tags, but for now let’s move on with grouping our keywords into landing pages.  Keep not of your modifiers, you’ll want to be sure to include them in the content of your web pages as you build them.

Now, we have a group with 3 main keywords and 3 modifiers.  What if we make another group that switches the modifiers and the main keywords?

Have you ever seen those fancy indented listings on Google?  Those happen when a website has not one, but two pages on the SERP.  Regardless of rank for the second page, Google will slide it up under the highest ranked page on your site for that term.

This gives us an opportunity to not only focus in on our modifier terms, but possibly end up with enough ranking to have each page act as an indented listing for the other.

Group 1 – Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist

Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]

Group 1.5 - Vermont Search Engine Optimization Consulting | Marketing Expert

Modifiers: firm, specialist

[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

Continue through this exercise arranging your keywords into groups of 3-5 terms with accompanying modifiers and titles.

Tomorrow we’ll take our group of pages and arrange them into a working site structure and channel our PageRank appropriately.

[search engine optimization firm]
[search engine optimization specialist]
[search engine optimization marketing]
[small business seo]
[seo strategy]
[search engine optimization consulting]
[search engine marketing service]
[search engine submission service]
[targeted website traffic]
[search engines optimization]
[search engine optimization expert]
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Site Structure – What is Page Rank?

May 18 2010 Published by under Site Structure

Today I’d like to dive a little deeper into what exactly Page Rank (PR) is.

If you want to get the full story, I suggest heading over to Wikipedia.  There you’ll find all the fun and fancy math formulas that show you how Page Rank is calculated.  I’ll give you a quick overview here.

Basically, the Page Rank of a particular page can be considered its popularity on the internet as a whole.  Page Rank comes from a calculation of links pointing to that particular page times a dampening factor to simulate a normal person eventually deciding to stop clicking on links.

Toolbar Page Rank is what Google releases about four times a year for public information.  It’s a numeric value between 0 and 10 with 10 being the most popular pages.  Google.com has a Page Rank of 10.

The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank is what Google returns whenver a search query is initiated.  This is the true Page Rank and is considered to be a primary factor in how well a particular page will rank in the SERPs for a particular term.

Abstractly, you could say that for a particular search the highest PR page would be listed first and then on down the line.  In reality, there are many other factors that Google uses to display SERPs.  PR is not the only factor involved.

PR is distributed through the internet by links.  Each page will pass PR through all links that do not include a “nofollow” tag.  The amount of rank passed by each page will then be multiplied by a dampening fact of about .85.

Assume we had only 3 pages on the internet.  A, B, and C.  Each page starts with a Page Rank that is 1 divided by the total number of pages.  In this case, 1 divided by 3.  Each page starts with .33 amount of Page Rank.

As you can see here by this example, if we add another page to the internet… say D.  We have in essence sliced off a piece of Page Rank for ourselves.  1 divided by 4 (A, B, C, D) gives each page a rank of .25.

Now lets say that we own page C and D, but want page C to have more Page Rank.  We simply link page D to page C, but don’t link C back to D.  Now Page C will have .4625 Page Rank.  (D(.25)*Dampening(.85) + C(.25))

Now that we know what Page Rank is and how it is calculated, the next logical question is:  How is it used?

Every time a search is done on the Google search engine, it will return results based on a number of factors.  One of which is the Page Rank of a given page.  That said, we can use this knowledge to pool Page Rank inside our own websites to have specific pages have a better chance of getting into the SERPs.

Google also requires a minimum amount of Page Rank for your page to even be included inside it’s index.  So, just making a page doesn’t mean that you’ll have enough authority to get ranked or even indexed by Google.

Questions or Comments?

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Search Marketing – Site Structures

May 17 2010 Published by under Site Structure

In today’s post we’re going to go over a few basic website structures that you can find on the web and which of these will make the most sense for your first website.

There are two types of site structure that you’ll need in order to make the most of your SEO efforts.

1. Visitor Site Structure – This is the organization of links on your website that visitors can follow.  Your basic navigation.

2. Spider Site Structure – This is the organization of links on your website that the search engines will follow.  The important one.

Any link on your website a visitor will be able to follow.  You can stop the search engines from following a link by including a “nofollow” tag to the link.  Links that include the “nofollow” tag will not allow Page Rank to pass through that link.

This allows us to build a website that is both user friendly AND optimized for ranking with the search engines.

If you aren’t familiar with Page Rank, I will post some basic Page Rank concepts tomorrow.

There are 3 main site structures that I’d like to cover today.  Many others are out there, but I feel these are the most important.

1. YarnBall – This site structure is the most common on the internet.  A YarnBall happens whenever a site is built with a template and one simple navigation bar that cause each page on the website to link to each other page on the site.  Simply, every page links to every other page.  This structure distributes Page Rank evenly among all pages on the site.

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2. Circles – This site structure isn’t all that common and typically only used by SEO experts that are trying to rank for a specific term or two.  In this structure, each page links to a page next in line and never links back to the previous page EXCEPT at the starting point.  With this structure you have 2 pages that will gather page rank.

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3. Stacked Pyramids – This site structure I consider to be the best choice for most SEO campaigns.  With this structure, you have your home page linking to 3-5 Tier 1 pages.  Each of these pages links to 3-5 Tier 2 Pages, but NOT to each other.  The Tier 1 pages and Tier 2 pages all link back to the home page.

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By using the stacked pyramids, you are able to pool your page rank from the website back toward the home page of your website or toward your most competitive keywords.

This gives us two advantages.

The first, most naturally occurring incoming links will be pointing toward your home page.  Thus giving more Page Rank to your home page.

The second, if we start our link building campaign with some of our less competitive keywords, we will be driving links deep within our website structure pooling Page Rank to be pass back toward our home page.

I know this all may seem a little random at this point coming from our keyword research, but stick with me!

Tomorrow we’ll go over what exactly Page Rank is and how it relates to these site structures, get some images posted to help visualize, and then move on to organizing our keywords into pages that we’ll plug into the stacked pyramid structure.

From there, we’ll just need to build our website and start building links.

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