How to structure website content for SEO

In the last tutorial we discussed the way to find the optimum content for the pages within your website. When this content is found, and when you decide on the various themes for the material, it is also very important to then structure the content.

By structure we mean organisation, but because this comes in the form of directories it’s always better to use the phrase ‘structure’. When users find a web-site, they see just what the owner/manager wants them to see. When a search engine arrives at a home page, it then sees the various paths to follow down the separate directories that have been created.

When you originally look at the website you want to create, SEO should always be at the forefront of the thinking with regards to directories, sub directories and other forms of content.

In a menu structure, the ‘top level’ categories are the main links within the menu. After this, the sub categories continue the theme all the way down to very specific and targeted pages. These are all called landing pages and should have a set number of targeted phrases for SEO.

To help understand the way the content is created, imagine the following scenario for creating a great content structure. To make it easy to understand, we have chosen a theme of “Orange”.

• You are in a large house called Orange. This is like the home page of a site, and it’s all about orange. It’s made of oranges, it smells orange and it tastes of oranges. It looks really orange.
• Then outside the orange house there are 5 paths leading away from the garden. These are sub categories on the website; places for people to choose to go. A path down a directory of a particular theme.
• The first path would be Orange Juice. This is a directory about different types of orange juice, how it’s made, where to buy it from. The second path is orange clothes, kinds you can buy and what they match with. You should get the idea of this tutorial by now!
• Every sub category then gets more sub categories and then more again. These are known as ‘clusters’ of information, and the diagram illustrates the idea.

Every path sticks to a variation of the home page but goes into a bit more depth each time. This ends up going deeper and deeper until you get to the very specific pages. These pages concentrate on phrases called ‘long tail key phrases’. Although they don’t generate as many searches as more generic words, long tail key phrases are a way to get masses of traffic by way of volume, and this can be much easier than getting up for the harder more competitive words.

Many people refer to the creating of the directories as ‘clusters’. The top level starts with a theme and then the resulting sub pages create a cluster of information on a chosen topic.

Creating your content in this way not only allows a very clear site map to be submitted for the search engines to crawl, it allows helps the value of the main category pages which target tough words. Every page below in the directory gives strength back up the chain. It also manages to help with the ease of navigation for the consumer. They can drill down a menu to get to where they want to be, helping conversion rates along the way.

How to structure website content for SEO - Sunday 5th September 2010