Whether you’re an SEO professional or a training beginner, running some advanced optimization techniques on your site is a pretty straightforward process. The main idea is to be somewhat creative in the way you use keywords throughout the content on your website. The trick to being effective is to develop a cohesive structure of pages that are both keyword optimized and creatively organized regarding your keyword goals.
The actual keyword optimization process involves how we use certain phrases in specific areas of the page, such as the page title, meta description, headings, strong tags, body text, etc. In this article, I take a step back to recognize actual site plans, or the organization of optimized pages, that contribute to higher SEO performance.
Organization of optimized pages
The way you plan and structure the organization of your pages is a key aspect of SEO and on-site optimization. In a general sense, you want to focus each page optimization on just one precise keyword target and perhaps a couple of variations. However, you can dig a little deeper into the page planning process by strategically creating an optimized architecture of keyword-relevant pages.
Creatively organizing your optimized pages can have a far-reaching effect on your SEO efforts. By this I mean structuring the pages of your site so that they are based on the contextual relevance of your site (or ‘keyword relevance’). Here’s an example:
Let’s say we’re optimizing a hair loss site for a new category of keywords around ‘hair loss treatment’. Most likely, we will create a new page that is optimized for that particular keyword; however, we can take optimization a step further by creating a series of supporting pages.
Depending on the nature of our website, we may want to implement additional pages that focus on hair loss treatments for men, hair loss treatments for women, natural treatments, etc. The idea is to establish optimal keyword relevance by creating a new tier of pages that target more long-tail keyword variations.
Linking Optimized Pages
In addition to the way we organize our pages, we also need to consider the way we link to our optimized pages. Linking properly from such pages can have a far-reaching SEO impact and sometimes lead to increased exposure in search engine results.
The important thing to keep in mind is to make sure that the linked pages are relevant to each other. For example, if we optimize a page for ‘hair loss treatments’, we might include a link in the content that points to other more in-depth pages, such as ‘natural hair loss treatments’ and ‘hair loss treatments for men’. all good as long as the link makes sense in the content of the page (often in a paragraph that is related in some way to the link).
There are two forms of links you’ll want to consider when linking to related optimized web pages on your site. They are:
- contextual links: links that are built in the copy of a page, such as in a paragraph of text
- crumb trail links: Links representing different page levels, often seen above the first header of a page (usually on all pages of the site)
The crumb trail links are pretty straightforward and will often be embedded throughout the site. Implementing crumb trail links is a great SEO move as it ensures that all relevant pages link to each other based on the user path or overall page depth of the site.
Contextual links should be built with users in mind. Before creating a link in a paragraph of text, ask yourself if the link would make sense from a usability standpoint. This underscores the importance of contextual relevance when building internal links. If the paragraph or block of content is about a certain topic, make sure that all links in that content are relevant to the text.
takeaway food point
When you look at well-optimized websites, they are often very deep and rich with valuable content across numerous pages. Each page is usually decently keyword-optimized for a specific search term, and each page is usually organized into a certain category of keywords.
One of the best analogies for on-site optimization is the creation of a textbook. The title or focus of the story is supported by numerous chapters, and each chapter is supported by numerous sections. The textbooks that are chosen for students are those that are well organized and offer a large amount of information. Keep this in mind when organizing and optimizing the pages of your website.