In This Issue:
What Our Clients Say ...
The design of my new site is something that I’m delighted to have my name on. Having a modern website of this quality ensures that visitors to my site get a real feel for what I’m about.
Michael Nadra,
Restaurant Michael Nadra
SEO Friendly Page Structure That Will Define Your Audience
There are so many different considerations when building a new site; such as getting your branding and colour scheme right and creating a usable layout and navigation. These are all important, but there is one little chap who often gets completely overlooked, how you break up your information and content across pages. This will not only determine what type of visitors you attract, but will also have an impact on the time spent on your pages themselves and ultimately, the success of your search engine optimisation (SEO) itself.
Understanding Your Audience Through Keywords
Traditional advertising methods give the advertiser no insight into those people who may see their product. Advertising on the web is completely different. Each visitor who lands on your page came from somewhere. If they came from a search engine, then we know their intentions will lie behind the search terms they entered into Google. If they followed a link, then it is likely they saw something on the referring site which led them to believe we can help them out, we already understand something about their desires and purpose.
Whilst each page on your website may share a common purpose and phrases, each will deal with a slightly different topic and can therefore be used to target different searches. Each page needs to be targeted towards a particular audience. Let’s suppose you are a plumber who performs everything from central heating to plumbing repair and boiler installation. It would be very tempting to put all this information together under a general page ’services’ which might include lists of statements. By simply breaking up the different services across pages and padding the content out with text, you will have more room to optimise each page for variations on themes around their target optimisation phrases and this will allow you to deliver highly relevant content, which in turn will improve the success of your SEO.
Identifying Content That Works for Your SEO
Identifying content that works for you is important and if you are using one of the tools available which gives you more analytical data on your site, you may be able to identify low bounce rate phrases people found you for, which will help you work out which visitors were receptive to your content after entering their search terms. You might refine the optimisation of each page to remove or rephrase terms that have a high bounce rate.
Whilst a high bounce rate could be due to many things, it could simply be the message includes too much information that is not relevant to your search visitor, who might wrongly conclude you could not satisfy their need because they simply didn’t read far enough down the page! If you add content to the site regularly, keeping track of your tracking data will also help you identify demand for a particular topic and allow you to pitch information you know will work.
Deciding When a New Page Will Help Your SEO
The questions to ask yourself are surprisingly straightforward, “What type of audience is this message aimed at?”, “What will this audience be looking for?” and “What sort of action do I wish to encourage from each type of visitor once they find this page?” If you allow these questions to govern the structure of your site, you will never go far wrong. If content is king, then how you divide up your kingdom will determine how effectively each page can work together and will improve the overall quality of your SEO.