Free SEO
The Next Step: From Page Optimization to Website Optimization
After implementing the SEO work described in the previous chapters you may no longer have time to work on your website because you've got too many new orders coming in that need to be handled first. If that's not the case yet, there may be some reasons for that:
- You just uploaded all the pages and Google hasn't had the time yet to index it all.
- Google couldn't index your pages
- Google indexed all the SEO you applied but it just wasn't enough yet.
In case it's the first option, you'll have to give it some time. But it's always smart to check if your pages are indexable. There are various reasons for why a search engine can't get to your pages. I can list them all but that just complicates things and in the end it all comes down to the same thing:
The only way for a search engine to find pages in your website is through links coded in HTML.
In other words, the links in your website have to look like this:
<a href="/a-page-in-your-site.html">A Page In Your Site">A Page In Your Site</a>
The obvious variations of this code that doesn't break the fact that it's HTML are allowed as well of course, but don't use for example, a javascript onclick event.
So just ask yourself: "Is this link coded in HTML??" If the answer is no, for what ever reason, you need to change it. It's as simple as that.
URL's Before even thinking about working on links the first thing to do is to work on the URL's in your website. Keep in mind that changing the URL of a page means you have to update all the links in the site that point at that page. So before working on the menu, breadcrumbs and any other kind of link, you do want all the URL's to be right first. This is going to save you a lot of work.
Navigation Optimization
The navigation of your website includes basically all the links there are, but we can organize all the links in different types. This will be discussed in the next chapter about navigation optimization.
Organizing Content
This is very related to Navigation Optimization because navigation depends on how you organize your content. It's pretty easy when you have an online store. You organize your products into categories and sub categories and place all your products in those categories. You get a pretty standard organizational chart when you do this:
Informative pages are pages like "about us", "location", etc. When you do add informative pages that are not about your company but simply information about for example your market, promotions, your customers, etc. etc. etc. you can and should also use a category structure.
Using categories to organize all the content in your page is pretty much the only sensible thing to do. Imagine the worse case scenario where you can only get to a page after having to visit 40 other pages first. Nobody wants that and therefore search engines also have no interest in those pages.
A category structure helps to reduce the number of clicks required to reach a page.
Be Creative!
Of course you can be creative and use variations of this type of organizing your content and pages. But always keep in mind that the more clicks that are required to reach a page, the less likely that that page is going to be visited. And with that, the less likely that search engines are interested in that page.
So you have to make sure that your pages are reachable with relatively few clicks. In practical terms for most websites this means at most 4 clicks to reach a page. In case you have thousands of (product) pages you need to be more creative, but in that case it is still possible to keep the number of clicks low.
When you have a website that is very well known, the rules are a bit different. An Amazon.com for example can use many more levels and still get most of it indexed. Just like in the real world, the more famous you are, the easier some things are.
Previous Chapter: The Real SEO Secret
Next chapter: Navigation Optimization in SEO