Internet Marketing Strategies, Resources, Tips & Advice

One of the things that's important to the success of your website, but often overlooked, is your website's structure. Today the search engines place fairly hefty weight on how your site is laid out, what components are included and your content.

Let's start with one of the basic components that easily get out of whack for most sites — directory structure…     

Before you begin building your website, sit down with a pencil and paper and map out what topics your site will include.  Your main topics should be included in your site's navigation.  Each topic should link to a separate page.   Don't try to include too much varying information on a page, instead divide your information into chunks and link each chunk to a separate sub-page.  

Try to keep your links no deeper than 3 pages deep as the search engines rarely index beyond that. 

Your Website Keywords
Your site has an overall theme or niche for which your site's domain name should reflect the best keyword.  If your site is about 'running shoes', then the words 'running shoes' should be in your domain name.

Next, each page of your site should reflect what is called your long tail keywords. 

For example, a site about running shoes should have ‘running shoes’ in the domain name.  A page talking about 'how to buy running shoes' might look like this:

http://www.runningshoes.com/how-to-buy-running-shoes.html

Your Title, Description & H1 Tags

It's a big deal to be #1 on the search engines but not everyone at the #1 spot gets the clicks they expect, that's often because their title and description tags fail them, meaning the title and description aren’t compelling enough to warrant enough interest. 

How unfortunate is that!

Your title tag should contain a clear title for your page that also contains your best keywords, but also think of the title tag as if it were an ad because this is what the search engines will use as the link descriptor to your site, so it's to your advantage to make it something that encourages a click. Keep the title to about 5-10 words, anything longer than 65 characters will get cut off so keep it short and direct.

I recommend creating a separate description for each page; your description can also influence the reader to click so again use your same keyword phrase as in the title tag and use a description that expands on your title tag. 

Your Heading or <H1> tags

Your heading tags are just good practice.  It's also a reinforcement for the search engines that your page really does contain what your title and description say it contains, and you want all the reinforcement you can get.

The header tags appear like this: <h1> Page Header </h1>

Your Site’s Content

The search engines require sites to offer value to its readers.  A search engines determines value by the amount of fresh, useful and unique content they find.

But what does unique content really mean?  Unique content is content that isn’t found everywhere.  An article on your site that is on 500 other sites isn’t going to do much for your reputation.  That’s precisely why private label content has become extremely popular because many PLR writers only distribute a set number of licenses. 

However the very best way to generate unique content is to generate your own.   Here are a few ideas for coming up with unique content that won’t be found anywhere else:

• Perform your own case studies
• Perform your own product reviews
• Create an FAQ page derived from your own visitors
• Request feedback from viewers and post the results
• Start a forum - this is an excellent way to encourage people to visit and comment
• Personally comment on industry related news items

These are just some of the basic building blocks for giving the search engines what they are looking for and helping you rank well. For more in-depth SEO tidbits check out Dan Thies SEO fast start guide.  It's still free and provides a lot of the simple step-by-step SEO training you need for top ranking. 

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