Optimizing Your Website - URL Problems
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When you link to your homepage, make sure it’s
instead of
This shows consistency in your link profile and is less confusing for search engines. The job of SEO is to make your website usable for search engines, so little cues like these, when combined, go a long way.
Make sure that all of your links lead to either www.site.com or site.com. Though they may seem the same, those two addresses are considered to be two different websites. There was once a lot of confusion regarding this, and Google now treats the two as one website, but it's better to over-insure yourself just in case. Select one of the formats and stick with it. Example: if you link internally and you selected www.site.com, then all other internal links should be www.site.com/more_urls.html, instead of site.com/more-urls.html.
This also applies to outside links.
If you use a content management system, make sure it produces search engine friendly URLs. Some content management systems make different URLs which lead to the same page, which is not good for SEO. Set up or reprogram your CMS so it produces single and keyword-rich URLs. There are extensions, or you may need to hire programmers to recode the management system itself.
If you’re building a website and planning on using a content management system, I recommend Joomla. It’s free and has better features than many systems that you have to purchase. On top of that, it has thousands of useful extensions, including some that are SEO-related.
Usability issues – DO NOT rely on navigation
Do not rely on navigation to guide visitors to the appropriate pages. Looking through navigation takes time and some effort. Your time is limited to a few minutes per visitor, so use it wisely.
Build paths to the pages you want visitors to see using links within content. A good example of this can be seen on the website for the Brooks Group. Though their links are not search engine friendly, they guide visitors using content, not navigation. Learn from them, but make your links search engine friendly. Check out the Brooks Group website to see what I mean.
Building navigation
Navigation should help visitors find what they need on your website and guide search engines to your pages. If you cannot use too many keywords in your main navigation, then offset the navigation to your footer and use keywords there.
Use breadcrumbs to make website more usable:
Homepage > Section 1 > Something Else > Article
It’s not necessary to make navigation 3-4 levels deep if you have a lot of content. In fact, including a lot of layers is usually confusing. Instead use 1-2 levels, but change it completely once users enter into different sections. Explore the Google Help center to see this in action. Notice how their main navigation changes once you enter into a different section or a large subsection that has a lot of content. It’s very intuitive and easy to use.
Linking out
You do not have much control over who links to you, so search engines go easy on links from bad neighborhoods, but you have complete control over who you link to. If you link to low quality spam sites, either by partnership or on your own, expect to see a negative impact on your rankings.
If you have links from spam sites and link to those sites, then you can be sure you’ll be classified as part of the spam network.
On the other hand, when you link out to quality, relevant websites, this tells the search engines that your website is a quality resource. Search engines are believed to take this into consideration, so link out from your content to high-quality pages.
Once you link out to useful information that visitors find interesting, you will be associated with that information, increasing the chance they will come back to you for more.
Sites to which you link may return the favor, especially bloggers who track incoming links and watch for “buzz.”
Next: Using No Follow to Sculpt Page Rank >>
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