In SEO, I personally find Content to be the most effective strategy in getting a website ranked. I mean Content is an area which simply seems to overshadow the other strategies by a huge margin. How would you, otherwise, account of the rankings of some websites that are not effectively exploiting other SEO elements and still ranking? Of course, because they are, in some way or the other, rich in content. However, the recognition of Search Engines pertaining to a particular SEO element has gone very deep and it really is impossible to understand it completely ( read - a flawless way to optimally exploit a particular area). This necessitates research in any area before you build out your SEO strategy.
Adding to this is the fact that since your competitor, unknowingly or knowingly, have optimized one of the SEO factors, it ranks better automatically to YOUR targeted niche. So, while URL Structure and File Naming has been very nicely managed by the competitor, he is ranking only due to that, in that niche. In order to rank better than him, you not only have to completely utilize the same factor as he is ranking through, but also make sure that you do better in other areas too, so that you control a vast niche. This is a major reason that working on all SEO factors are actually important. You are bound to lag behind in each of the factor but a cumulative effect of all SEO factors optimized even to 50% would mean better positions in the search engines.
Content, is one such SEO factor, that I think renders all other elements small. Earlier, websites ranked only because of the content (mostly what is considered as Spam today) but content still has not lost its charm and continue to be the most effective SEO component. To get most out of the content, it is essential that an effective Content Strategy is built and themes are targeted based upon the niche you selected.
The niche that you wish to target can be based upon the keywords analysis. So lets say that there are people who wish to enjoy vacations near the sea. They will be a Niche community for you. Initially, I would advise to target these small niche and build upon further. So you can dedicate a page/s for such vacationers using the right keywords. You might have to set a primary keyword and secondary keywords for particular niche.
After identifying these Niches, the whole webpage has to be related to this niche. Now this includes your Content Strategy alongwith the other SEO factors.
An effective Content Strategy has certain vital elements attached to itself, like:
a. Title,
b. Descriptions / Meta Tags
c. Headlines
d. Body Copy
e. Inbound Links
All these elements have to be effectively placed in the web-page and equally effectively written. These are what are considered to be prominent places of the webpage where spider is most likely to give weight to.
While these vital positions of the web-page are identified, the content to be written there can be known by answering some questions to yourself (if you are not hiring a content writer : )) e.g: what kind of informative pages would you browse through if you were to buy your product from someone else, what are the areas of interest that are related to the product you are selling – the allied industries, speak to your customer service- see if you can come up with a FAQ section or as many different questions as are asked by the customers. Take these questions separately to build out your pages. Most likely, these are the questions that need to be addressed since they will be the queries of many visitors to your website. What better way than to address them before anyone asks them ever. Evolve yourself more by asking many such questions or asking your team to do that for you. A very nice article on content development has been posted by Rishi at SEOmoz.
Once you have answers to, and the like of above questions, you will be in a much better position on HOW to draft your content.
Now, let me just take you through the Optimization of the web content by taking each of the above mentioned components of Content one by one:
a. Title: Title is, what describes a page. And is, what it means in literal terms. One you know what you wish to write in the Body Content, you have an idea of how the whole content be described in just one simple line. However, with SEO lets move in the reverse order. You actually do not know what to write but your keywords analysis and Niche Selection clearly dictates on what you SHOULD write about. These Keywords / Niche shall serve your Title and taking this Title as cue, a web copy is written. So, a Title necessarily are the keywords in a sentence with not more that 75 characters in length. (Although there has been an observation recently that Google is serving pages with Long Titles but that’s not constant. There are always movements in algorithms of search engines). Short content seem to attract more visitors and is precise.
You can use all variations of Title i.e. Start with the Keyword Phrase you wish to target on that page, follow it with a primary keyword and end the sentence with (may be) a special feature / call to action etc.
A recent development is to use commas when separating your keywords and not Pipes (as were largely used earlier)
b. Meta Tags: Although Meta Tags have lost their sheen in the eyes of many SEO professionals, but I still consider them to make a difference. It is believed and have been observed that a page having no meta-description is auto displayed by Google by picking up a relevant portion of the body copy. This is acceptable as long as the meta-description is not available but I regard the very foundation of meta-tags (and that of SEO) is building that relevance. Your meta tags gives a relevance to your web-content and hence is helpful in one way or the other in informing the search engines the web-content of your website.
Meta-Tags may contain keywords & Meta Description.
Use Meta-keywords very carefully. Some websites seem to stuff this portion of the code with as many keywords as it permits and which are all sort of keywords at one place. So you may find Rome rentals, Tuscany Vacations, venice backwaters etc all at one place. This is simply not worth doing the effort. A Meta-Tag describes briefly to the crawler what is contained inside the page and so we have to be very precise and ‘to the point’ in what ever we write here. So if you are creating a page on Casa Stella Apartment, you can use keywords like Casa Stella Apartment, Apartments in Rome, Economy Apartments in Rome, Rome Rentals at Stella, etc etc and all variations that you can think of. Even if I can think of only 2 possible keywords for a page, I will keep that limited to just 2 without unnecessarily increasing the no.Meta-Description is like ‘precise writing’ we used to do in our English Class in School : ). So your Meta-Description has to explain the body content in a very effective way while keeping the keywords being optimized in mind. The description should range from 180 – 225 characters in length.
c. Headlines: Headlines need to cover the important aspects of the webpage and includes H1, H2, H3 etc. These should be keyword based catchy headlines always instead of straight forward texts. For instance, if you have a ‘facility section’ of a particular hotel on a webpage. So, instead of writing just “Facilities”, you may try writing –Facilities at ABC Hotels in the headline. This would ensure that your Headlines are Keyword Reach. You can even use - Enjoy the facilities at ABC Hotel. Similarly, you have to identify important parts of the webpage and use Headlines to describe each small text para in the same way as you have described the page with its title.
d. Body Text: Body Text is the most important factor of the content optimization and which ensures that the content is actually well written and upto the point. The whole body text revolves around the keyword phrase you wish to optimize. Here you have to keep in mind the Keyword Density. Many websites try to use ‘keyword stuffing’ to rank their websites. This is considered as spam in the Search Engines. A healthy keyword density is 3-5% to be used in the content. This percentage is the fraction of all the words contained in the Body Text excluding words like “in, and, of, or etc”.
e. Inbound Links: Links are basically outbound links and inbound links. You have to use the anchor text in such a way that the link pointing to a particular page or column of the page is described by the anchor text itself. Anchor text acts in the same way as the title of the page. The inbound links to your website from other sources, like a press release etc have to be anchored using proper RELEVANT text. The content writer has to keep in mind various pages that could be linked to the content while writing.
While all the above strategies may not really be the strategies. These are the best practices that we can engage ourselves in, to produce an optimized web page with rich content. Of course, nothing could be rich than fresh and first-hand content. And coupled to using the above tips, one should regularly be updating the content with better and more relevant trends in user behavior and search engine algorithm.
There has been (and still continues) a lot of discussion on the URL Structuring & File Naming all around the SEO industry and among many webmasters. So I thought to summarize this here today.
Shari Thurow emphasizes Information Architecture even before the URL structure is determined, I strongly agree. Information Architecture is actually a pre-cursor to URL Structures which is a part of the final interface. The Info Arch is how the information is grouped and categorized on the website. The definition says it all and makes us realize the importance that it carries before taking the first step ahead. The interface is the next step.
URL STRUCTURE
Talking about the URL Structure, let me first start with what we know as Dynamic URLs (database driven) and Static URLs. The first thing that we should understand is that Search Engines “do not” crawl websites with too many parameters in the URL.
Okay, before I even start talking about anything let’s not forget the Golden Rule for SEO
“All of our SEO efforts are in the direction to make our web page easier to be indexed.”
Now, as I said the crawlers do not like too many parameters in the URL. Validating this with the Golden Rule, we conclude that the URL should have as less parameters as possible (This could be Theorem #1).
The spoilers are the CMS that often generate problematic URLs. An easier way to solve the complexity of a URL should be to consider that the URL that is easy for a human-visitor to remember can be the URL that is easily crawled by the Search Engine. Just how do you think these URLs should be – Static & Shorter (Theorem #2).
Other things that one should consider:
- The URL structure should support a page’s desired message whenever possible.
Infact, the URL structure is very much dependant on the Information Architecture (as said above) i.e which page you want to link with. This is a very important aspect and should be well understood. - The URL should be as user friendly as possible (Theorem #2)
- Use fewer folders, try to keep your important site content less than three folders deep. (Theorem #3)
- Avoid use of numbers as opposed to using descriptive keywords
- A general belief in the SEO industry is that search engines prefer the use of a hyphen over an underscore. Infact it is believed that “abc_xyz” are considered 1 word by the search engine while “abc-xyz” are considered 2 separate words. So hyphens instead of underscores are advisable.
FILE NAMING
The only thing that you should care about is that – whether the page (which you are trying to name) is going to be associated with a main Key- Phrase regarding what that page is about?. Whether it can be mentally associated with the URL as a whole and the content of the page?
So for example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/widgets/blue
Or it can even be http://www.yourdomain.com/seo/blue-widgets/
However, I would never use it like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/web/seo/widgets/blue/
Try to keep the subdirectories & folders to a maximum of 3 (Theorem #3)
File namings have minimal effect on Search Engine Rankings and hence too much brainstorming is not necessary for including keywords in the file name. What is generally observed is that keywords in the file name are a determining factor for less competitive searches only.
As a best practice, the following check list should help:
- Is the URL shorter
- Is the URL static
- Is the URL Dynamic. How many parameters does it have?
- Is the URL suggesting the message my page have.
- Does the URL have more than 3 sub-directories / folders.
- Does the URL have nos instead of descriptive words?
- Does the URL have upper case letters (Always keep the naming restricted to lower case).
- Are the words in the URL separated by hyphen.
- Does the URL correctly and logically describe a visitor’s path.
- Is the URL clearly organized with respect to information architecture.
- Is the file extension indexable (I would generally keep my file extensions .html. I personally think they are the easiest to crawl. However, the software engineers at Google claims that Search Engines can index almost every extension now but I still don’t mind taking this extra step.)
Write in or add more if you think I have missed out on something.
