Restructuring Your Site for SEO

I was reading an article today on Search Marketing Standard, by Chris Stiner regarding web design site restructure, who gives some very relevant information on the steps to take to proper SEO optimization when re-designing or structuring a Web site. In fact, we often try to explain this process to our clients but frankly, I think Chris says it best here so I might as well save my breath. Thanks Chris!


The challenges of restructuring a site that has been optimized for SEO are major. If you are going to make fundamental changes to the look, flow, and � most importantly � content of your site, here are three important steps you should follow if you want to maintain your positive rankings in the SERP s.

1. Create a one-to-one 301 redirect map of pages from the old site to the new site. Make sure the pages are as close to an exact match as possible.

2. Make sure that any old site pages that do not have an exact corresponding new site page are redirected at a category level.

3. Any old site pages left that still do not have a home should be redirected to the new site home page.

The reasons for doing this are plenty. Your website is full of assets that you need to protect. Here are the top three things you want to maintain during and after a restructure of your site.

1. External links to your website. People who follow these links need to land on relevant pages. If you lose the relevancy of an inbound link by redirecting it to a generic page, you lose most of its value. More importantly, you want the search engines to map the links correctly.

2. Deep link pages of your site in the SERPs. When users click on them, you will want the correct pages to show up. This mirrors point #1, but from the user�s perspective via the search engine.

3. Bookmarks of your site. When a user attempts to go to a bookmark, you want to make sure they get the information they are looking for. Again, relevancy is king.

If you have a large site (over 100 pages or so) here are three techniques to help you prioritize your pages to ensure you are taking care of the most important content first.

1. Identify which pages are receiving the most traffic. Your analytics software will help you here.

2. Use Google Webmaster Tools to identify your external links and what pages they are landing on.

3. Use Yahoo Site Explorer to locate the top pages listed by your external links. Yahoo lists this in order of importance most of the time.

By taking a serious look at your site structure and not skimping on the upfront work of site mapping and 301 redirects, you can eliminate most of the headaches that can come as a result of a poorly planned SEO restructuring.

Search Engine Optimization Strategy

A well planned and well thought out search engine optimization strategy is key to running a successful search engine optimization campaign. Search engine optimization strategy changes often. The biggest key to this change is based on the new rules search engines such as Google decide to change their search parameters and algorithms to. It is article marketing. Article marketing is the process of writing and submitting articles to article directories. The benefit for you and your website is high quality anchor texted backlinks. The benefit for the article directories is content. Article directories want good high quality content to fill their directories with. The benefit for search engines is also content. Search engines love textual content and therefore there's no better textual content like articles. If you are creating good high quality and relevant content in the form of articles, the search engines will index your content, rank it high in the search engines and give you backlink credit for it.

You can have reciprocal links which are two-way links that link two websites together. Search engines much prefer one-way backlinks.

This article is only a snippet of information about search engine optimization strategy. There's much more to know about search engine optimization strategy and article marketing. There are tons of videos proving that article marketing works as an effective search engine optimization strategy.

5 Ways to Get Your Site Indexed By Today

If your website is not indexed by search engines, it will not appear on the search engine listings.

1. Submitting a XML sitemap to search engines. The xml sitemap includes links to every page of your website. It is a file that you can submit to search engines to get your pages indexed. By submitting your xml sitemap, you will notify the search engines about your website and index every page of it.
2. Create a HTML sitemap page on your website. This allows visitors to navigate your site easily and allow search engine spiders to follow the links and discover all pages.
3. Place HTML text links on your website. Search engine spiders follow HTML text links to discover other pages of your website.
4. Directory submission. Submit your website URL to a list of SEO-friendly directories.
5. Article marketing. Social media sites are generally indexed regularly by search engines. So by placing your website URL on social sites, search engines spiders can discover your URL very quickly and index your new website.
   

Search engine spiders are looking for new websites and pages every day.

Keyword Research Critical To SEO

Proper keyword research should be the basis of your optimization.

Keyword Research Critical?
Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. For example, "search engine optimization" gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while "search engine marketing" gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target "search engine marketing", you may get great rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for "search engine optimization". So it's a key component of search engine optimization.

There are two main aspects to keyword research.

The first is popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. The keyword popularity tools (other than Google's) use the search data from a number of other smaller search engines along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are being made for specific keywords. You may wish to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.

The second aspect to keyword research is competition research. Competition research starts with analyzing your web pages to determine how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords. Determining keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for this keyword, though other methods can be helpful as well.
1. No one other than that search engine designers knows how each search engine determines how competitive a site or page is and the search engine folks aren't talking.
2. Each search engine has a different way of determining how competitive a site or page is.

Without good keyword research, your search engine optimization efforts will be like firing a gun into the dark. You may choose keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site at that time