Google Optimization Secrets From The Trenches - Going Higher, uhh, Heir … archical that is
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If you check out Google’s information on how they rank pages (http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html) you’ll see that they recommend that you “Make a site with a clear hierarchy.”
In other words, you should be able to describe your pages using middle school outlining techniques. Here is an example (I’m going to insert some tags to help make things a little easier to figure out):
- <Title>Dieting, Health – My Terrible Diet Site</title>
- <h1>Dieting your way to Health and Vitality</h1> (very top of site)
- - <h2>How to Diet without killing yourself</h2>(content article title)
- - - and then there is some of the content itself
- - <h2>How To Eat Enough While Dieting</h2>(content article title)
- - - and then there is some more content
- <h1>The Crispie Crème Diet</h1>
- - and now some content for this one
In many ways your entire site should be laid out like that. Now I understand that you may have multiple table panes, but the main content section of your site should be laid out pretty close to what I've shown above. You could almost think “blog” for this, but I’m not saying your site should be a blog, I’m just using that as an example.
To make this easier, you may want to check out one of the outliners over at http://www.outliners.org. Unfortunately, you may find that there isn’t much there for Windows machines. But that’s okay. All those outliners do is output an “OPML” file (opml stands for Outline Processor Markup Language), and the OPML standard is ridiculously easy to understand.
And as a side benefit, Google can (and does) read/use the OPML file if your site has one. It will use that file to obtain more indepth heirarchial information about the way the data on your pages are laid out.
You can get the entire OPML spec at http://opml.org/. Understand that the whole issue with OPML is still one of those "hush-hush" things within Google, so you’re really getting the inside scoop on this one.
With that said, the folks over at Google aren’t stupid. First, your OPML file must be used to describe content that actually is on a page that can be reached from your site's main page. Second, the OPML file must be a reasonably close representation of the actual page, and third you must provide a link from the page to the OPML file so the Google Spider can find it.
If you adhere to these rules, then Google will use the additional information that can be obtained from the OPML file, and that will help to drive up the rankings for your site, because of the additional meta data within the OPML file that can’t be found on an HTML page.
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