Internet Business Blog

As an Internet Business or website owner you probably already know all about the importance of being ranked highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and how it can exponentially benefit your website by landing more visitors, subscribers, and sales. What you may not know is how to accomplish such a task - and make no mistake, it can be quite an accomplishment.

Unfortunately, most websites are still being designed to fail. They may look pretty, sleek, or very ‘web 2.0′, but lack the fundamentals of proper site structure. If search engines aren’t crawling or able to index your website properly you will be at a huge disadvantage. Follow the techniques below to make sure that your site is on the path to higher search engine results and proper indexing.

Title Structure

It’s pretty easy to surf the internet and find sites which still concentrate on stuffing their page titles with keywords separated by commas. Granted, they may get away with this if they are in a small niche market due to lack of competition but this is still generally a frowned upon technique that will not get you very far.

Here is a classic mistake that you should absolutely under no circumstances make. Every single page on their website has the exact same title. This is a very bad practice for one major reason:

Title Tags Tell the World What Your Page Is All About. This is why each page needs to have a unique title tag, preferably outlining the page’s content. It doesn’t need to be very long, a couple of words will do just fine, but make sure that it is absolutely unique on your website or you run the risk of duplicate content -or- having your pages indexed incorrectly.

Meta Structure

I’m only going to cover meta tags briefly because they are now considered to be a technique of the past. You may as well fill them in, but don’t spend more than a couple of minutes doing so.

A. Meta Description. The Meta Description is still sometimes used today when your website is pulled up in the search results page, so writing an interesting yet brief description of your site’s contents may encourage a higher number of click-thrus.

B. Meta Keywords. Meta keywords are basically dead. Most if not all of the major search engines no longer use them, and many of the minor engines are actually powered by the major engines. In other words, Meta Keywords carry little to no weight in search results. Still, time after time I am contacted by aspiring SEOs, Webmasters, and Business Professionals who still want meta work to be done.

Why?

I have to assume that this is strictly due to lack of knowledge regarding the subject. Many people may have learned the initial “ins and outs” of search engine optimization a couple of years ago during a simpler, much easier to manipulate search algorithm. Not so anymore!

C. NOINDEX & NOFOLLOW. The robots attribute lets search engines know whether or not they are allowed to index or follow specific pages on your website. This can be very useful in some circumstances, which is why I have listed it here. Most webmasters will not need to pay attention to this however, since we generally want all of our pages indexed and crawl-able.

… There are many other meta tags but none of them are considered to have any real relevance in today’s Search Engine Optimization industry so I would recommend forgetting about them and focusing on what works.

Content Structure

The structure in which your content is laid out on your website is extremely important. This key process is often times the difference from being on page #1 in the SERPs and page #10.

Use Heading Tags. Heading tags essentially tell search engines which keywords to emphasize their focus on. I suggest using the standard H1 through H3 on every single page as if you were writing an outline. I try to think of heading tags as the skeleton of my content. In any given page I try to use:

H1 - Once.
H2 - Two to Three times.
H3 - Three to Five times.

This heading structure has always produced excellent results.

Express Yourself. Don’t be afraid to bold, italicize, and underline words from time to time. Not only does this help your readers, it’s a common line of thought that it helps search engines distribute weight as well.

Write Unique Content. Do not copy, Do not steal, and Do cite your sources. Nothing angers search engines and webmasters more than stolen or duplicate content. If you do steal content, expect to eventually be black listed from every major search engine. It’s simply not worth it, no matter what situation.

What is “worth it” however is spending some time to create very unique, very useful content that will keep visitors and search engine bots coming back for more. Think: if you write it, they will come. This will also help to establish link relationships and build back links to your website because readers will want to show the world what you have written.

As always, this is only a rough overview. There have been many articles written about proper Site Structure and how it relates to search engines and I encourage everyone to seek them out. If you follow the structure techniques listed above you will be well on your way to not only a cleaner more efficient site structure, but quite possibly a higher listing in the SERPs as well :).

Tell me your thoughts on the subject below! I am always looking to learn and share ideas.

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