Site Structure For Search Engine Optimization

Most profitable websites will need at least hundreds (probably thousands) of pages of content. To be
optimized that content must be organized - the result being your site’s structure.

Perahaps the best thing about optimizing your site structure for search engines is that it’s often
neglected, giving you you a great chance to beat your competition.

Use the following pages to find out how to optimize your site structure, and then find out how to
optimize your site’s navigation:

1. Website Navigation Optimized For Search Engines by Mark

Nunney, 15 August 2007

Navigation is key to helping users and search engines find what they want and it is essential
to search engine optimization (SEO). Here’s a introduction to how to optimize your site’s
navigation.

Read: Website Navigation Optimized For Search Engines

2. Why SEO Must Target Groups of Keywords by Mark Nunney,

15 August 2007

Targeting single keywords with your SEO is unlikely to be profitable – SEO must target
groups of keywords which we’ll call keyword niches.

Read: Why SEO Must Target Groups of Keywords

3. Website Structure Optimized For Search Engines by Mark

Nunney, 15 August 2007

A website with ambitions to support even a modest business will need to plan for hundreds,
soon thousands of pages, and all that content has to be organized for users and search engines
or it might be lost to them both.

Read article

Why SEO Must Target Groups of Keywords by

Mark Nunney, 15 August 2007
Targeting single keywords with your SEO is unlikely to be profitable – SEO must target groups of
keywords which we’ll call keyword niches.

Keywords are words used to search on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
SEO teaching is usually centered on single keywords & single pages.

This 'single keyword' approach is often useful but it misses the big picture that, to be profitable, most
websites will need to be successful for hundreds of thousands of keywords.

Let’s find that big picture and put SEO and keyword research into context and perspective.

SEO in Context
A website needs enough traffic, sales and profit to maintain a significant part of its business...

... perhaps as much as 50% of company turnover

... and at least one employee for the smallest of businesses.

SEO in Perspective
For a small business website, let's see how many...

 visitors are needed

 keywords must be targeted, and
 pages built.

We’ll look at some real figures for thinkingmanagers.com which supports one full-time employee
and earns revenue from newsletter subscriptions and advertising.

The site has about 7,000 pages indexed by Google, see grab:

…and 75,000 visits a month - see following grab from a Google Analytics report:
Note that the site needs to be successful for 37,000 different keywords to bring 75,000 visitors and
make enough sales to support just one employee (a ratio of visits:keywords of approximately 2:1).

These figures raise an obvious question: can you give 37,000 different keywords individual
attention?

Of course you can't.

Those figures were for one month. If we look at the figures for two months, the proportion of visits
to keywords used doesn’t change much (so the number of different keywords used almost doubles),
as we can see in the following report:

One of the reasons for this is that as many as half of all searches made in any day are done so with
unique keywords. Clearly, we can’t specifically optimize for keywords that are only used once.

The diagram below shows another Google Analytics report, this one from a higher traffic site. Again,
we see that the ratio of visitors to keywords used is almost 2:1.

You can’t beat the stats - even a small business must target hundreds of thousands of keywords (I’d
say millions but I don’t want to scare you).

This restricts effective SEO and keyword research, making that traditional single keyword approach
seem almost comical in its inadequacy. So what to do?

We must think in terms of groups of keywords which I’ll call ‘keyword niches’ - a niche being…

… a group of keywords that share a single (seed) word.

A Wordtracker search, made with a seed word, shows us a keyword niche (or to be more accurate it
shows a sample of a niche, using the keywords in its database). For example, let’s look at the
‘management style’ keyword niche, ie, searches (keywords) containing the words management +
style.

The following diagram shows us Wordtracker’s results for the ‘management style’ keyword niche:

For our example site – thinkingmanagers.com - the following report from Google Analytics shows
one month’s results for searches with that niche’s keywords:
Approximately 4,000 visitors came to thinkingmanagers.com after searching with 1,100 different
keywords from the ‘management style’ niche.

This site targets those ‘management style’ words and thousands of others simply by writing quality,
long articles that reference ‘management style’. We can’t specifically target the individual keywords
but we can target the keyword niche, its seed word and then let the quality content chase the tail.

So instead of looking for, comparing and targeting single keywords, we must target keyword niches.
For example, on thinkingmanagers.com, instead of targeting the following important single
keywords …

 management style
 management theory
 quality management
  business strategy
 business management
 business development
 corporate culture
 entrepreneur

… we target each of the keyword niches for which those are the seed keywords. That job will clearly
need a lot of content so you’ll need lots of ideas for creating your web content.

As we’ll cover on other articles, before creating that content we should find target niches and then
prioritize them because we can’t work on them all at once.

We prioritize different keyword niches by finding out which ones will give our site the best return on
our investment - an evaluation based on how successful our site currently is for each keyword niche
(we look at current traffic and sales) and how successful it might be (we look at niche size,
competition and potential sales).

The result of our prioritizing is our SEO strategy.

Website Structure Optimized For Search

Engines by Mark Nunney, 15 August 2007
A website with ambitions to support even a modest business will need to plan for hundreds, soon
thousands of pages, and all that content has to be organized for users and search engines or it might
be lost to them both.

If organized, both users and search engines will easily find related content and both will be happy.
Such organization is simple – here’s an introduction on how to do it…

Create ‘categories’ to which your content can be allocated. For example, on a business management
site – thinkingmanagers.com – the categories include:

 management style
 management theory
 quality management
 business strategy
 business management
 business development
 corporate culture

Each of these categories has a home page – a category page (aka a ‘cat page’) that introduces its
subject and lists links to relevant pages on the site.

As new pages are written and made, they are allocated to appropriate categories and are listed on
those categories’ pages. For example, the page in the following link is the ‘business strategy’ page
from thinkingmanagers.com - it lists links to all pages on the site relevant to ‘business strategy’.
The two grabs below show first the copy introducing that page’s subject, and then some of its links
to relevant pages…

A category page introducing its subject:

Relevant pages listed on the above category page:

It is not, of course, a coincidence that those categories from thinkingmanagers.com match the
keyword niches used when we looked at keyword research and SEO strategy. This is why I'll often
say that keyword research is site structure planning - your target keyword niches become your site's
categories.

You can then use Wordtracker to give you ideas for relevant new content to write. Using ‘business
strategy’ as the example shows below, Wordtracker tells me that the following keywords containing
‘business strategy’ – ie in the ‘business strategy’ keyword niche - are amongst the most popular
searched.
Each of those listed keywords (and Wordtracker lists up to 1,000 for each search) is a potential idea
for a new page. For example, I could commission or write articles on ‘small business strategies’ and
‘e business strategy’ knowing that they would be targeting popular keywords.

If I was to write and optimize one of those articles on, say, ‘small business strategy’ I would first do
another Wordtracker search with those words and yet more keywords to target would be revealed -
see the following grab:
Now we can see how our SEO process starts to come together:

 With keyword research we find a prioritized list of keyword niches to target (our SEO
strategy).
 Those keyword niches become categories on our site - the major part of our site's structure.
 Within each category - ie within each keyword niche - we build content to target that niche's
child keyword niches.
 There are many ways of generating content, but…
 One search on Wordtracker can give you up to 1,000 ideas.
 Ideas become pages - optimize your pages.
 Just one page can successfully target over 10,000 keywords.
 Optimized website structure needs an accompanying optimized site navigation.
 Last but certainly not least, we must promote our content and build inbound links.