Web Marketing all-in-one for Dummies®

Chapter 4. Making Search Engines Love Your Site

In This Chapter

• Creating and maintaining a great site structure

• Building great on-page structure

• Optimizing for trust

Search engines want relevance. In this chapter, I discuss how you can make your Web site more attractive to search engines by creating content clusters and using deep links. I also go over how to maintain your Web site after you optimize it.

After you understand how to structure your Web site, you can use a semantic outline to create an appealing structure for each page. I also cover how to optimize your Web site for trustworthiness.

Structuring Your Site for Search Engines and People

Think of your Web site as a pyramid. At the top, you have the homepage. One click away from the homepage, you have the second layer of content. Two clicks away, you have the third layer. Each additional click moves you another layer down in the hierarchy until you can't click any further away from the homepage. That's the bottom layer. Search engines award more relevance more readily to content that is closer to the top of the site pyramid.

You can bring content to the top of the pyramid by

• Creating content clusters so that you create individual, high-relevance hub pages within the site structure. You can then link to these high-relevance pages from your homepage and move the entire cluster up the hierarchy.

• Deep linking to extremely important pages directly from the homepage, which moves this content up the hierarchy.

Creating content clusters