Creative Design News and Case Studies
 

We talk a lot about what makes good SEO, with internal and external links, content publication and social network syndication. By emphasizing relevance on all levels throughout your website you can seriously command top ranking positions for multiple search terms.

By starting at the core of your website you need to create topical nodes of relevance that feed up and down to the surface of your site and back again. Think about how a flower functions and through its veins vitamins flow up and down from the roots to its petals. In the same way link flow and page rank needs to flow up and down to emphasis specific topic areas.

This technique is also great for rescuing languishing pages that are suffering from a lack of link lustre. “Acquiring competitive keywords involves synthesizing keyword clusters, content and mirroring a similar core throughout the site architecture that is strategically unified to overcome common barriers to entry.”

Each keyword has its own tipping point i.e. the point that it requires to topple the competition and regain momentum in the search results. The more unique and relevant content that features your keywords and the more links flowing deep within your website the more likely they will offer the right signals to the search engines. Try to think about keyword clusters. Get a pen and paper and just jot down a list of keywords you want to rank for. Then jot down a range of keywords relevant for the top level keyphrase and you will soon start to build a structure that should be represented by your website.

Lots of keyword clusters all linking to each other and joined together by a series of more links, similar to branches on a tree.

However all of this requires detailed keyword research. There are specific details to bear in mind and therefore you should aim to avoid:

1. Off-topic or sparsely written topical content. If you really need to write about something that is irrelevant, then consider a no-follow or no-index tag on that page to block the search engine robots from finding/following that page.
2. Having too many subfolders can push for key landing pages away from the root folder.
3. Lack of sufficient internal links. Make sure you manage your internal links effectively.
4. Lack of sufficient external links to critical landing pages (Aim to gain around 10 links or more, from different websites, to the pages that matter).
5. Lack of anchor text diversity (don’t use the same anchor text excessively to build links).
6. Lack of link lustre. Use sitemaps, alt tags and RSS feeds to bolster each pages link profile.
7. Don’t expect changes to get indexed and rankings to change overnight, it takes time.
    

Finally don’t forget to back everything up by optimising your title tags and meta data which should reinforce the specific content of that particular page. By not creating custom meta data for each page you run the risk diluting the website topical theme.

It is ideal to encourage:

1. Relevant linking based on keyword density i.e. cap outbound links per page.
2. Using separate templates to increase usability, conversion and SEO simultaneously.
3. Place your primary content either in the main navigation or close to the root folder.
4. Gaining links from a diverse range of IP’s and authoritative sites.
5. Regularly updated content to reinforce your websites topical theme.
    

‘The larger your website becomes the more potential there is for it to produce more traffic’. Remember that the more competitive the keyword the more content and assistance your pages will need to topple the top ranking sites. This can be achieved through effective site architecture, navigation and links in order to secure a stronghold in search engines.