Google Search Engine Optimization Tips: SEO Site Review Session - Structure Your Information for Your Visitors

Tip#9: " In presenting information on your website in a top-to-bottom fashion, make sure all "important" parts of your website (such as content) are on the top/upper portion. Put all less important items/features at the bottom of your website, such as those that are not as useful to most of your visitors, such as user login "

Not all of your visitors use wide screen LCD monitors. Some may even still be using 15 inch monitors. This means that if the website is presented to them, what is prominent is the upper portion of your website. This is the portion of your website that gets noticed immediately. Make sure all of your important content can be read in this section.

Failing to present the important information first will affect your conversion rate as well as the average time your visitor spends in your website, as these visitors will likely press the back button and continue to look for relevant information somewhere else.

This tip can also help you in relation to any page loading problems on your website. Even if the website is still not fully loaded in the browser, the user can now start reading your content.

Tip#10 : "To increase user engagement, the average time visitors spend on the website, and improve internal linking; it is important to feature links showing related content as part of the page design."

A common example is Youtube.com. Using "Related Videos" links beside the video being watched increases the time the user spends on the site because of high user engagement with these related videos (after watching the video, they also have the tendency to click on related videos).

In this case, you'll want to showcase the related content in your website to your website visitors.

This is a good strategy, because the longer the visitor stays on your website, the most likely it is that the visitor will turn into a customer, a loyal reader and a fan.

Instead of letting them use the search box to find related posts in your website, why not directly show links to the "related content"? This is a much more user friendly approach, and you also get benefits from an internal linking strategy based on related documents.

Tip#11: "For better web design and user interaction, it is much better to put up video generated content than a tiring and repetitive sideshow. "

How many websites have you visited that show a tiring, slow and repetitive flash-based slide show on the home page? It would be better to just put up a short video about that content, because it provides more user engagement, more interesting content and conveys a lot more useful information than a repetitive slide show consisting of images.

Tip#12: "In an ecommerce website, make sure that if the user clicks on the product link found on the product page, the site takes them directly to the exact page of the product and not to another domain showing another set of products."

If this is done incorrectly, it can translate to poor conversion rates, because the customer cannot buy "exactly" the things he/she wants.

Do not let your potential customer search the entire website for the product because your product links don't work properly. They will most likely navigate away from your website and look for that product somewhere else.

Tip #13 : "If you plan to develop a search engine friendly website based on AJAX, one of the toolkits to look at is Google Web Toolkit."

Google web toolkit is a suite of website development tools from Google. This toolkit is open source, and you can use it to develop AJAX-based websites without worrying too much about search-engine-related issues.

In the second part of this three-part series, we will talk about issues pertaining to keyword research, link building and website marketing.