Your Website Structure
When you build a page here are some basic things you should include:
Use your keyword phrase in the <TITLE> tag.
Use an informative, non-repetitive description in the “Description” META Name of the <META> tag.
Try to naturally use the keyword once before the first paragraph, ideally as the first element after the <BODY> tag as the <H1> tag. This makes the search engines consider the keyword phrase as important, relevant to that page.
Keyword used once in the first paragraph; rarely twice and never more than that. Most of the time, when we’re talking about a particular subject or person, we use pronouns other descriptors to refer to the subject; we hardly ever sound repetitive naturally.
Never over stuff your keyword into the content of the page. The content should follow natural language and should never seem like it’s a packed set of keywords.
You can use images, but you should avoid using images as an anchor for a link. Although the search engine spiders are getting more sophisticated, assume the robots can’t see the pictures and can’t interpret that content; therefore, the pictures are meaningless and degrade the value of your link.
However, the <alt> tag is a great place to use your targeted keyword. The <alt> tag shows text if the image is not available. It’s also useful to the person looking at the site to see what the picture was related to.
If you must have a Flash site, then you MUST have an HTML only site so you can be crawled properly. Again assume the search engines can’t interpret the content of a flash animation or any other non-text base display. There are many expensive Flash based sites that are getting spanked in the search engine results by other more text based sites. While there is talk that the spiders can now read some Flash, I would hold off on making a site that way.
SILO Structure
The last element of effective SEO is in your website’s SILO, which is the overall structure and organization of your website itself. The best structure (SILO) involves categorizing your website. Think in terms of the theme of the website, then theme of a section of that website and then the them of the individual page.
House Pets
Dogs
“MyDog Spot”
For example, if you run a website that covers various hobbies, you could categorize your content based on each topic:
www.example.com/stamp-collecting
www.example.com/coin-collecting
With websites based on blog platforms such as WordPress, this is automatically created for you within the software itself, but for static HTML websites, you will need to manually create individual folders on your server that feature keywords relating to each sub section of your website.
If you only focus on one topic that doesn’t contain sub topics, you can still break up your content and categorize it based on individual topics.
For example, if your website is focused on traffic generation, a well structured SILO would break down your content into individual categories including:
www.example.com/articlemarketing/index.html
www.example.com/searchenginemarketing/index.html
www.example.com/PPC/index.html
To link to your SILO structure, you would include direct links to each category from your main index page, and then each category on your server would include individual pages or articles based on its topic.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is also exceptionally important in search engine optimization.
With anchor text, you are describing a link, whether it is internal (one page linking to another) or external (where you link to an outside website).
Example: A regular link would look like this: www.your-website-url.com but an anchor text based link would look like this: Your Keyword Phrase
Anchor text is important because it allows you to rank for specific keywords, rather than just for your main website’s URL.
When creating internal and external links, you always want to do your best to focus on including your primary keyword phrases, and that you vary the text used so that you are able to rank for different keyword phrases, rather than just one.
This is very important with off-site SEO when creating back links for your website as well. A link to you site is good a link with your targeted keyword is much better.