Utilize Directories for Increased Hits - From My Own Experience...
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Unitedbands.com was about four months old when I redesigned the URLs. It had next to no click-throughs from search engines at that point. When the spiders crawled the site after revamping the directory structure, the next month saw 500 referrals from search engines. The second month that number doubled to 1000 referrals, having made no new SEO adjustments, just allowing for higher indexing in the search engines. The spiders were now crawling the site almost daily because of the amount of click-throughs that were happening.
This approach worked because several key concepts were followed while designing the URL directory structure.
- First, the actual URL, Unitedbands.com, is descriptive and contains a common keyword.
- Next, the directory structure was designed to use keywords that would be commonly used by users within the target market. For example, I could have just as easily called the directory, 'artists' or 'entertainers' or 'groups'. While this would have made sense from an organizational standpoint, it would have been a stupid mistake from an SEO standpoint. Most people searching for groups on the Internet don't search for a specific act using a query like, 'The Beatles, entertainers'. They would search for 'The Beatles, band' a lot more often than any other keyword.
- Finally, the URL was kept as short as possible to not water down the weight of keywords within the URL.
In some cases, content doesn't happily fit into one broad category. That's fine and it can actually work to your advantage. By creating sub-directories, even more keywords can be included in your URLs. Follow the same approach with sub-directory naming as with directory naming and even more hits will come rolling in from the search engines.
Next: Tips for Naming Your Directories >>
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