Organizing Website Content

Author: Spencer J Casey

 

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:00:00 CST – When developing your website, it is critical to organize the navigation structure and content to be search engine friendly. This article highlights some important things to consider when designing your website, including defining header tags, body text, and hyperlinks within individual pages. A webmaster’s goal should be to develop a website that is logical not only to web visitors, but to search engine bots that index your website.

In a previous article, we highlighted the importance of including a page title, a description meta tag, and a keyword meta tag within the head sub-section of your code (To Learn more: Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines). The next step is to ensure that the content on the individual pages emphasis and compliment your title and description. Search engine bots want to make sense of your pages. A well designed page will have a common thread between your title, meta description, meta keywords, and the information/content displayed on the page.

Step 1 – Keywords in your Header (H1, H2, and H3)

When designing your pages, you should focus on target keywords or phrases. Those keywords should be clearly identified within the headers on each page, with the most important information being placed in the H1 tags and the least important information in the H3 tags.

On the Casey Designs Homepage (http://www.caseydesigns.com/index.htm) The H1 header tag is “Web Hosting, Design, and E-mail Solutions”. This tightly integrates with the introduction paragraph, which happens to be my company mission. This H1 header tag describes my company. Also, on that page I highlight “Web Hosting”, “Web Development”, and “E-mail Services” with a H2 Header Tag. Again, I am trying to let search engines know that this is clearly important and relevant.

The goal is simple. Use Header Tags to not only highlight and inform visitors about content on the page visually, but also to define the organizational structure, outline your priorities on the page, and provide a map for search engines on what is important.

Step 2 – Keywords in your Internal Hyperlinks

When search engines index your site, they not only pay special attention header tags, but also hyperlinks. It is a good idea to utilize internal hyperlinks, within your web, to place emphasis on specific keywords and help users transition from one topic to another within your web. You can also consider using hyperlinks for your Header Tags.

Step 3 – Keywords within your Body Text & Images

When developing the body text for each sub-section on a page, you should use keywords and phrases that match your meta description and keyword tags. Search engines expect consistency and well organized web pages. Define a header tag, and then do a good job of explaining more within the text. It is also important to provide alternate text for all images. Bots cannot read images, so you need to provide alternate text.
Finally, it is especially important to construct a well-written first paragraph that features the overall mission or goal of the page. On www.bing.com, you can run your mouse of search engine results. When you do, it will usually highlight more information about the website (which is usually the first paragraph). See example below:


Conclusion

A website should be optimized for search engines. This requires that a web developer construct an organized navigation structure, clearly defined page titles, descriptions, and keywords. Then utilize header tags, hyperlinks, and keywords and phrases within the body text to enable search engine robots to accurately organize and index your website.

A well constructed website will improve your user’s experience, and improve your search ranking.




 

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