SEO Site Structure

Structuring Your Site For SEO

Following is a list of essential tips on how to structure your site and its pages and directories optimally for search engine optimization purposes.

Page Content

• Keep your pages short, between 2 and 8 KB in size.
• Place your most important keywords and phrases in your <title>, <h1>, and <strong> tags. But be careful not to overuse the strong tag - it is important that the strong tag be used to naturally emphasize important words, and not merely keywords, or your page may be given a Keyword Stuffing penalty.
• Minimize JavaScript, Flash, sound, etc. as these are not recognized by search engines. Quality text content is much more important.
• Eliminate irrelevant content - minimize content and maximize quality (relevance).
• Pages with quality content usually rank better (because they are linked more, giving you higher link popularity) than mere online brochures or pages that focus on selling things.
• Content should come first - read about the SEO table method you can implement to ensure that your quality content is sourced by spiders first.

Keyword Phrases

• Link to your start page (front page or home page) from all pages with your most important keyphrase (combination of keywords). Your start page should be based on this keyphrase.
• Represent your important keyphrases well on all pages and use the keyphrase as linktext (the text that people see when they click on a URL, as opposed to the actual URL).
• Also include the keyphrase in image alt tags, as these are read by search engine spiders.

Meta Tags

• Each page should contain no more than 4-6 keywords in the keyword tag.
• Description - no more than 120-150 characters.
• Meta tags are rarely used by Google anymore - the description tag only to display your site's description in the search results.
• Keyword and meta tags should never use "global keywords" (you should have unique keywords for each page).
• Focus on specific keyphrases that you are optimizing on - no need to include general words.
• All other meta tags are unnecessary for SEO purposes.

SEO Site Structure

• Organize according to themes and logic based on your keywords phrases (keyphrases can also be a single word).
• Use book-like structure, with chapters and blocks delegating importance.
• Use header tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>) for content hierarchy: h1 tags for the page topic (ie. use only one per page), h2 tags for a topical headings, and h3 tags for sub-topical headings.
• Use <strong> tags to emphasize a page's keyphrase - you can style these accordingly.
• Search engines recognize stylesheet alterations to tags - use carefully.
• Short link paths - users should be able to access subpages by traversing a minimal number of pages from the start page.
• Each page should have one concept, ie. one or maximum two main key phrases that are more important than the rest.
• A single, unified concept (without additional data) will greatly increase weighting (importance) of that page in the world of pages that exist for that keyphrase.
• Have an identical navigation menu on each page, with navigation links based on keywords.
• Build focus points by repeating links and linktexts
• Use keywords for linktexts that are present in <title> and <h1> tags
• Keyphrase tags (<title>, <h1>) should not contain more than 4-8 keywords (60-80 chars), as each additional word dilutes the worth of a single keyword.
• Only text links count - not graphical buttons, etc.
• Don't use pop-ups! These are penalized heavily by Google.
• It's best to minimize scripts and dynamic code (ie. JavaScript) as well. In fact, JavaScript links are ignored.
• Redirect example.com -> www.example.com (this prevents the distribution of LP to two domains). Read more about domain redirects in our  search-friendly domain and file redirects tutorial.