How to maximize your on site optimization

We all know backlinks are the key to ranking well, but your link building efforts can produce more results for you in a much quicker manner if you follow these on-page seo tips, AKA global navigation structure, AKA site architecture.

A note before we start:

There’s a LOT of minutiae involved in on-page optimization and this post is by no means an on-page optimization Bible, but the basics are here and applying these to your sites will reap some benefits for you.

If you’re a bit of a newbie to this stuff, there’s some basic stuff you need to know about first:

Spiders, AKA search engines spiders/bots – How Do The Search Engines Read Your Website?

When the search engine bot visits a website, it reads all the visible text on the web page, the content of the various tags in the source code (title tag, meta tags, Dublin Core Tags, comments tags, alt tags, attribute tags, content, etc.), as well as the text within the hyperlinks on the web page. From the content that it extracts, the search engine decides what the website, and web page is about. There are many factors used to figure out what is of value and what matters. Each search engine has its own set of rules, standards and algorithms in order to evaluate and process the information. Depending on how the bot was set up by the search engine, different pieces of information are gathered, weighted, indexed and then added to the search engine’s database. Manipulation of the keywords within these webpage elements form part of what is know as search engine optimization. Source:

Long story short:

When it comes to on-page optimization you want to make sure your site structure allows these bots, or spiders to easily find all the urls on your site that you want indexed.

TIP: I see a lot of blogs and websites with Calendars in the sidebars or columns and these calendar displays reputedly cause the spider bots to go into endless loops since they’re following the links on all the dates, and eventually give up trying to spider your site after a certain period of time has elapsed.

So remove those calendars folks! It serves no purpose, the site visitors don’t get value from it, and it could cause poor indexing and spidering of your site content (A.K.A. crawlability).

This is why some of your on site posts, articles, pages etc… will fall OUT of the indexing or get de-indexed; because the spiders eventually determined that, in their eyes, the content doesn’t exist since it wasn’t able to find it.

Increase the user-friendliness of your site

A sure fire way to lose a visitor is to have a disorganized flow and site structure….

 

 

 

I’ve had people tell me that my site when it had the old theme activate looked very disorganized because there were so many categories and so much content to read…

Sorry folks, but when you have a lot of content you need to be a “nazi” about keep things in their proper categories and since what I do here is basically link building services reviews, link building tips, and SEO tips and articles, then I/we have to put things in their proper place, which means more categories as more content gets added.

What if you came to my site looking for information about link building services…?

Would you know that I reviewed close to a dozen of these services unless they were all put into their own category?

Do you think you’d be able to EASILY find out if I reviewed a certain service by reading dozens of posts, or would it be easier to see a separate category listing for each one?

Point being: a lot of content isn’t my worry, no web content writer is a mind reader who can answer your specific and unique questions without knowing you first, and more categories means easier navigation.

How to tell if your site is “pleasing” to your visitors:

1- # of pages viewed per visit

2- visits duration

Both of these statistics are available in your cPanel under AWStats section.

If/when you make any on-site structure changes take note to see if these numbers improve after you make some design changes.

Secondary and tertiary level content

This is a fancy term meaning that site visitors are 1-2 clicks away from the home page at all times.

Good site architecture basically means having an “easy to get back home” design for your site.

What to do:

Footer links - these appear on each and every page of your site, so link to home page url using desired main keyword anchor text here (NOT site name, not main site URL, but anchor text for THE main keyword for your site)

Use footer links to ensure that each and ever page of your site links to the home page so visitors are one click away from home way at all time, as are the spiders/bots…

Website Pages - On blogs these are different from posts and are considered secondary level content areas ( 1 level away form home page)

On blog platforms like WordPress, you can display your Pages in a sidebar, therefor eon your home page, you’re linking to these secondary level content areas from the home page.

When you are publishing a page, link BACK to the home page using main site keyword anchor text.

 

 

So make sure you have this sidebar widget displaying your pages, and if your theme os CSS allows for it, link to or display the Pages in footer areas, too.

Website articles or posts; tertiary level content, AKA third level content

When you’re reading an article or blog post, you’re usually 2 clicks away from the home page at that point unless you see a footer link or HOME link and click that, but normally on a blog post you might not be sure where to go at that point:

• Read related posts?
• Click on category link inside post area?
• Click on certain category displayed in sidebar widget?
• Go find the link to the home page?

To ensure the spiders can crawl your site properly, link to Previous and Next articles posts, and link to category from each.

Also use related posts plugins or find a way to show your readers there’s related content they might be interested in reading.

“WordPress Blogs are great for SEO and the Search Engines love them”

I’m sure you’ve heard this state many times before on several places right?

Well, the reason for this isn’t because WordPress is some super-duper platform.  The reason for this is, WordPress practically hands you this type of site structure right out of the box by linking to categories from posts, linking to categories from home page, linking to Recent Posts from home page etc…

In a previous post I wrote about on page optimization factors, but here’s a structure checklist that should make your websites more receptive to backlinks;

Footer links -

• remove powered by WordPress links,
• remove links to Theme created by…
• link to home page url using ONE anchor text keyword (the main keyword for your site)

Home page -

• Remove default blog roll (if its a blog)
• Remove calendar (useless, and harmful)
• Link to categories (1st level linking to second level content)
• Link to recent articles published (spiders love it when you make it easy for them to find new content)

Second level content (IMO these are WordPress pages and/or categories, other platforms would have same)

Pages should link UP to home page using main keyword as anchor text so reader can easily get back to home page ( 1 click away from main site url view)

Third level (tertiary) content like articles and pages-

• Link to the category the content was put in. Most WordPress themes do this by default.  Even though most themes don’t index the categories, it’s good for reader experience and exhibits good organization on your part.

 

 

 

• Link to next article and previous article (GREAT way to ensure that spiders see, and index all your content)

Quick Note: Virtual Silo plugin and Thesis themes do this for you automatically

• Use Related Posts plugins or Related Articles scripts (for non WP blogs) to display related content your readers might be interested in

More tips: About Cross linking and inter-linking

You don’t have to stop your interlinking just as the basic design level (linking to home page cateogries etc..)

Use a script or plugin to hyperlink certain keywords that send visitors to affiliate links or better yet inner pages of your site.  This way, whenever you mention an oft-repeated keyword/keyphrase on your site, you can automatically link those keywords to an appropriate on-site article or affiliate link.

NOTE: I use a free plugin called Cross linker *which does the following: Get it here

This plugin automatically hyperlinks selected words to defined URLs. The hyperlinking process works in posts and comments (given as an option) currently. If you are upgrading from any other previous version, then DO NOT deactivate the original installation of this plugin. See the installation instructions for more details.

Cross-linker plugin and what I don’t like about it (looking for a better solution actually)

Normally when I link to an external url, whether it be an affiliate link or a link to a resource like that plugin referenced above, I recommend linking to off-site urls using the NEW attribute, which basically means that the link will open up as a new page, a supposed to using the SAME attribute which basically means you’re sending the visitor away form your site (maybe for good!) .

The Cross linker plugin doesn’t allow for this to be an option so if you use it then you need to use it sparingly.  I really do wish this plugin would let me define whether or not the links were dofollow or not, and would also like it if it let me dictate that only a certain number of hyperlinks were given out per post, so if I mention Unique Article Wizard 10 times on a post, that it’s only get linked to a few times, not every single instance.

I think I’ll just have my own cross linker plugin made that does all these things now that I think of it because all of these outbound DoFollow auto-hyperlinks can reduce the link juice of a site.

Looks like this post ran kinda long, so I’m gonna end things here, let me know HOW MUCH minutiae I left out, but like I mentioned at the beginning of this article, there’s a lot of little nuances that can the affect the overall site structure, link juice and on-page SEO for your sites.

Hope this helps you! Seacrest Out!

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