Step 1: Do Keyword Research

First, pick a set of keywords you want to target. Make a list of 15-30 keywords that are relevant to your business. Choose unbranded keywords that relate to your business or industry, as opposed to choosing your company name. List these keywords with their associated information in 4 columns titled Keyword, Relevance, Difficulty, and Volume. Pick your own relevance score on a scale of 1-5. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find information on difficulty and volume (the number of searches per month).

From this set of keywords, pick about 10 of them that have high volume relative to their difficulty, and are relevant to your business. These are the keywords you want to target.

Step 2: Set Ranking Goals

Now that you have basic information on your keywords, you should set ranking goals for them. These goals should be time-framed, For example, you can have a 6 month plan, and monitor your progress bi-weekly or monthly.

In the end SEO is a bit of a black box. Setting realistic ranking goals is not a pure science. The goals act as more of a motivator, and can be modified if your results are not what you thought they would be.

To make your goals as realistic as possible, see how well you are doing in SEO relative to your competitors using Website Grader, a free tool powered by HubSpot. If you’re score is below 50, chances are there are some easy things you can do to improve it.

Step 3: On-page Optimize

By now, you know what pages you want to rank higher, and what keywords you are targeting for them. Now, all you need to do is target them. I recently wrote a little guide on keyword targeting, which I hope you check out.

One warning I should put here – before you tailor your page to target a keyword, make sure your target page is not ranking for other other keywords. If you have one page targeting multiple unrelated keywords, you might consider creating multiple pages for each keyword.

Step 4: Build Internal Links

On-page optimization is only about 25% of search engine optimization. The other 75% is link-building. To gain SEO authority, you want to get links from relevant pages going into the page you want to rank higher for. The easiest way to do this is by leveraging your current online real estate. Here are two effective and overlooked strategies for internal link-building:

Put Links in Your Blog Posts

Blog posts are a probably the best opportunity to build internal links. Each post is a new page that search engines see. If you put a standard link bar or footer on your blog, then each new blog post will contain a link to the pages you’re targeting.

Put Links on Your Home Page

Your home page will usually be the page with the best authority on your website. Putting links to your target pages in your navigation bar or in a footer with keyword-driven anchor text can be an effective way to improve SEO.

Step 5: Build External Links

Finally we arrive at external link-building. Get links from relevant websites with high authority is the most effective way to raise the authority of your own site. Some people call this the ‘hard’ part of SEO. I wouldn’t say that, but I would say that it takes patience. If you follow the guidelines below consistently, you are sure to gain plenty of inbound links.

Blog

Link building is one of the many benefits of blogging. Blog posts can be great viral pieces of content that gain inbound links.

Promote Your Content in Social Media

If you want people to link to your content, they need to know about you. Get involved in Twitter, Digg, and Facebook. Connect with people in Google Groups or LinkedIn Groups. Whatever you need to do to connect with your audience in a way that’s engaging for them, do it. Become a valuable resource and they will be more likely to link to your content.

Make Your Content Shareable

Make sure to put links on your site so that people can tweet and share your content via facebook. Instead of spreading the word about yourself, let people take the initiative to spread the word about you. Not only is viral content more likely to gain inbound links, but links in social media now count as inbound links for search engines.

Submit to Directories

Submitting your website to legitimate directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory can help you get found, and gain inbound links. You can check out these free directories to instantly improve your search engine authority.

Step 6: Monitor Your Progress

Now that you’ve done all the basic steps, its time to monitor your progress. Create a basic SEO Dashboard with the columns Keyword, Target Site, Monthly Searches, Difficulty, Rank, and Rank Change. Monitor and update your rank on a regular basis – for example, every 2 weeks. Your rank change is the difference in your ranking since the last time you checked.

Above all, do not give up on SEO. Your rankings might rise and fall over the course of your process, but getting to higher rankings can take time. However, it is a necessary component of an effective online business strategy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Making the Process Clear: Improve Your Search Engine Rankings in 6 Steps

Imagine if you had a program that would automatically go through the posts on your site/blog and automatically find concepts and dynamically add links to related documents from the web. Now let’s go further and have that program track the people reading your page and by looking at their history and implicit past actions, ensure the links were tailored to each person reading said content. Wouldn’t that be freakin awesome?

Now imagine if Google wanted to do that. Not so cool anymore is it? Lol.

That’s precisely what was proposed in a recent patent awarded to Google. I really am not sure how it was intended to be used, but I’d have to imagine for their own properties… there would be wholesale mutiny if they tried using the toolbar (or Chrome browser) for such implementations. Here’s the patent;

Enhanced document browsing with automatically generated links to relevant information
Awarded; June 17, 2010 – Filed; February 23, 2010

Although this was an update to the one filed in 2004

Publication Date: 04/13/2010
Filing Date: 06/30/2004

How Google might add links to existing content

They give the example of an article/document about a hiker’s (Bill Cross) effort to climb Mt. Everest. The system would find additional links to supporting documents about Mount Everest, Novolog Peaks and Poles Challenge and maybe even reference something relating to diabetes (which he suffers from). Those skilled in the art, search geeks, get the idea I am sure.

Now, they don’t stop there, it gets personal. Let’s say for example the searcher/user has previously queried for items relating to photography. Other links can be included for items such as ‘Everest photography’ and so on.

The personalization data can also be geo targeted. Let’s say the user/viewer is from a given location. Then the system might also put links to localized relations such as ‘hiking Mt Rainer‘ for someone from the Seattle (USA) region. For those familiar with the various methods of personalization, I am sure you can extrapolate from there. We can further take this to include any form of personalization that they have at their disposal that are relevant to the document being viewed.

So it would be looking for related information to the document being viewed through query data and personalization.

“The information relating to the current document may include information based on the text of the current document. The text may be processed to obtain, for example: (1) all terms appearing more than some pre-determined number of times, (2) named entities that can be automatically extracted; (3) dates in the document; (4) author and publication names; and/or keyword or category extraction.”

The bits about named entities is interesting and sensible given whom worked on this patent. More on that later, but this is generally related to persons/place/thing. Terms that appear more than a given threshold are deemed to important and/or descriptive. The date element can be used in concert with these to find contemporary documents relating to the one being viewed. This would be especially important with News.

The question is; where would they use it?

The implementation is somewhat fuzzy though. The discuss displaying the notation separately, with a link and snippet, but also as an in-line link. A link that is added to the content dynamically. How this is proposed to be accomplished is unclear. Obviously Google can’t just start modifying the page without the page owners permission, thus the intent with this patent is somewhat unclear unless implemented on a Google owned property.

“(…) may incorporate the additional documents located by search component 410 into the current document (i.e., the document currently being viewed by the user) or into a new document that includes the current document. The additional documents may be incorporated with the current document in a manner that informs the user that the documents are available without being overly disruptive to the user’s reading of the current document. ”

Once more, that is about all they really discuss as far as implementation. There is no mention of 3rd part content nor use of a browser add-on nor toolbar. Where they were going this this isn’t entirely clear.

Now, beyond the tin foil of wondering where and how they were thinking of implementing it, this does make an interesting idea for anyone optimizing for search. Imagine a WordPress plugin that could do this for you? Sure, we wouldn’t have the level of personalization data that they do, but dynamically creating links within a document, say from top results for related terms, would be a handy gizmo and play well with trust algorithms such as TrustRank and HarmonicRank.

I leave you to ponder it all… just thought it was a strange one.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google dynamic linking

Let’s say for the sake of example that we sell wedding shoes. Our staff knows a lot about this subject, and is very experienced in that field of work. Therefore this niche produces the most natural topics to write about. We would write about how to choose the most comfortable wedding shoes, or how to choose ones that will support your feet best and still have high heels, or what is trendy currently … You get the point.

The next step is to publish these articles as guest posts in as many blogs and websites as possible, so we can get the precious links.

First we need to make contact with bloggers that tend to write about weddings, introduce ourselves and offer articles to them. These bloggers are more open than others to receive and publish guest articles about wedding shoes.

At this point, we encounter the first problem – How do we find a large number of these bloggers?

Our immediate solution was very simple – We search for posts regarding weddings, so we can contact their authors. We do that by utilizing Google Blog Alerts on one generic keyword that appears in these posts in high probability: “wedding”.

You can do this by going to Google Alerts, then type “wedding” and choose “Blogs” as the type, and fill the rest of the fields. If you’re logged in to Google when you do this, then you have the option to receive the alerts in a feed instead of email.

An employee reads the alert feed frequently (let’s say twice every day), looks at all the new blog posts about weddings, and identifies bloggers that we can contact.

This employee then tags these blogs in Delicious, with the tag ‘GoodBlog’.

If you are not familiar with Delicious tagging, this is the time to explain that each tag creates an RSS feed (we call this a tag-feed), which gets filled with URLs as you tag them. This usage of Delicious Bookmarks is a very powerful productivity tool, and it’s free!

So these blogs get tagged as GoodBlog, and thus an item is generated in the Delicious tag-feed, and we let another employee read this tag-feed and contact the bloggers. A rather simple process that is also mostly scalable. This process so far requires only little man-power.

While doing this, we found out that a single Google Blog Alert on a generic keyword like ‘wedding’ ends up with a huge quantity of results… Some of them are interesting and related to weddings – so we can contact their authors, like this one. But others aren’t relevant at all, or are spam blogs (splogs), scrapers (a growing phenomenon), and other Internet junk.

For example, a few irrelevant sites that keep popping up are gossip sites and magazines that talk about celebrity weddings and stuff like that (for example, this one). They are not likely to accept out wedding-shoes articles, so we prefer not to contact them. If possible, we prefer not to see them at all in the alerts.

So this brings us to the second problem – How do we separate the wheat from the chaff?

We observed early-on that it would be enough to filter out a limited amount of specific spam sites and other unrelated sites that, for one reason or another, appear again and again in the alerts.

Our first idea for a software-based solution was to write a PHP script to filter certain URLs from the alert feed, and thus generate a filtered feed. A quick sketch for such a script is:

1. Read the alert feed
2. Iterate over all items
3. Remove items from sites we don’t want
4. Keep all others
5. Output the kept items as a feed

This kind of script would do the job, but it would require tweaking the script every time we wanted to add a new site to filter.

So we came up with another trick, and this is the main point of this essay: The list of sites to filter doesn’t need to be hard-coded into the script.

Instead, the script can use several Delicious tag-feeds that contain the list of the sites to filter out.

So now we have an improved feed filter that generates a modified feed on-the-fly. The employee who reads the modified feed, can use one tag (‘GoodBlog’) to mark a blog for later contact, and another tag (‘BadSite’) to mark a site for future filtering.

The feed-filter script will filter any entries from a site that was tagged with any of these, from then onward!

The end result: A large and ever-growing list of good wedding-related blogs that we can contact and publish articles on.

Any blogs that we already identified and maybe contacted, as well as any spam/junk/irrelevant sites that we don’t want to see anymore, are all filtered out of the alerts feed. As an added bonus, the whole process tends to optimize itself over time, so the employee has less and less spam to go through.

From the productivity and usability point of view, the most important aspect of this whole system is that the user interface is dead-simple and intuitive for the employee. They tag a site, and it works as expected.

We want to share this element of the system with everybody, so you can all do this kind of thing. We call it the PHP Feed Filter, and we give it to you here for free, so you can use it for your SEO efforts.

A word about how it works

We use very simple RSS parser and writer classes, based on PHP’s XML facilities. However the parser doesn’t work well for Google Alerts ATOM feeds, so we also included SimplePie, which handles those feeds well.

If you wish to use the feed filter for your own system, you should:

• Generate a Google Alerts feed and put its URL in the sample script file where it says “Unfiltered alert feed”.
• Generate tag feeds in Delicious as you see fit (they appear at the bottom of the page when you look at tagged entries), and put them in the sample script file where it says “Filter feeds”. You can also use private feeds if you wish to keep all your work hidden from competitors.
• Let your employee enter the sample script’s URL in their RSS reader, like Google Reader.
• Remember to tag the homepage, and not a specific post or page, so that they get filtered correctly.

Summary

Note that the code is not very optimized and a bit crude, but it is very simple and straightforward. You should be able to modify any part of it quite easily to fit more complicated use cases. This is also why we used free 3rd-party services like Google Blog Alerts and Delicious Bookmarks.

A system such as this allows you to scale your article distribution and guest blogging efforts while maintaining efficiency. In fact, in some ways efficiency increases over time as you learn which sites you wish to avoid in future.

We hope you find our code useful and please do let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve it!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Automate and Scale Your Guest Blogging

Rather than struggle internally to find topics for your next blog or article, let data drive your reporting or writing. Tools like Google’s Adwords KeyWord Tool, BlogPulse and Wordtracker are good for discovering what topics are trending for Copywriting inspiration.

Content Farms vs. Attention Mines

Newspapers and journalists have bemoaned the growing industry of “Content Farms” in recent years. As sites like Examiner.com and Demand Media grow in prominence, traditional publications are losing web traffic and thus, advertising opportunities. But how are Content Farms getting so many readers? Shouldn’t the journalistic reputation of major newspapers and magazines be enough to attract readers? Not anymore, thanks to search algorithms.

Algorithm as Editor

As online journalist Jason Fry (@JasonCFry) explains in a recent post, Content Farm sites use of algorithms to create story ideas in an “algorithm-as-editor” model. This flies in the face of the traditional writing style in which editors or bloggers assemble story ideas through a keen journalistic, yet un-digitized public awareness or crowdsourcing. Now, writers are guided by search engine queries, a model you can use when attempting to ward off copywriter’s block.

Attention Mines

Noted journalism entrepreneur Michael Tippet (@MTippet) reengineers the somewhat spammy reputation Content Farms have evoked by calling the collection of sites Attention Mines. In this sense, writer’s still hold the key to the car, so to speak. Writers, bloggers and professional journalists can all use algorithms in developing story ideas, but don’t let search queries alone guide your pen. Keyword research is only one component to identifying what readers want and what they need. If we let search engines write the stories, we’d read nothing but Justin Beiber and Twilight features.

Make Headlines, Don’t Write Them

There’s a big difference between merely commenting on search queries and using them to write good copy. If you’re posting a blog or article, strive to create a headline and add to the conversation, rather than merely rehashing the keywords you saw in your keyword research.

Algorithms can tell you what readers want, but more importantly, they help you understand why. In your keyword research, you’ll come across story ideas that make sense, but a few that are out of the blue as well. A great article can come from those outliers. Keyword research can help you find what an audience wants to read, but as a writer, you must give them what they need..

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Algorithms: The Cure for Copywriter’s Block

This has inspired me to share some ways that would help those hard-working travelers like me and let them use your content while on the go.

1. Offer Various Ways to Download Your Content

I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:

• This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
• It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
• This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):

Besides simply offering your readers an alternative format enabling them to download and access your content, a pdf file could also increase your reach. For example, Scribd, a popular document sharing site may generate some decent traffic to your blog.

2. Create Quick Outlines of Your Monthly Editorial

Imagine how many people are now coming back home from holidays: you may help them a great deal by offering a quick but useful recaps of your previous posts (for the past month, week, etc). These overviews won’t probably generate many Tweets or comments but they will engage users in another way: they will encourage them to go through the content they may have missed.

An alternative way to represent the information you have previously blogged about would also be nice. For example, a well-branded PowerPoint file representing your previous posts will be much appreciated. Besides, this way you can re-use your content by publishing it to SlideShare (which, in turn will be shared in your LinkedIn network if you use SlideShare official LinkedIn application):

You can also create a downloadable copy of your recap (in an eBook format) to allow various ways to access and go through your outline on- as well as offline.

3. Create an Audio Version of Your Content

An audio post comes incredibly handy (and appreciated) while you are on the go. While PDF version of your content makes it more “offline-friendly” as well as easier to use on iPad, the audio version makes it possible for your readers to listen to your articles on their iPod while on the plane or even on the beach.

I have reviewed one plugin that “adds voice to your posts” – Odiogo automates the process of turning each of your blog posts in a podcast (as well as adds the option to download your content to your blog feed):

If you want to make the process more selective and the voice less “machine-like”, there are other applications like Audacity which is free recording software.

Creating an audio version of your blog posts will also increase your exposure as you can submit your content to heavily-used podcast directories like iTunes (To submit to iTunes, go to the iTunes Store, navigate to the Podcasts directory, and click on the Submit a Podcast link.)

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Re-Purpose Your Content to Optimize it for Traveling Season

This has inspired me to share some ways that would help those hard-working travelers like me and let them use your content while on the go.

1. Offer Various Ways to Download Your Content

I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:

• This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
• It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
• This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):

Besides simply offering your readers an alternative format enabling them to download and access your content, a pdf file could also increase your reach. For example, Scribd, a popular document sharing site may generate some decent traffic to your blog.

2. Create Quick Outlines of Your Monthly Editorial

Imagine how many people are now coming back home from holidays: you may help them a great deal by offering a quick but useful recaps of your previous posts (for the past month, week, etc). These overviews won’t probably generate many Tweets or comments but they will engage users in another way: they will encourage them to go through the content they may have missed.

An alternative way to represent the information you have previously blogged about would also be nice. For example, a well-branded PowerPoint file representing your previous posts will be much appreciated. Besides, this way you can re-use your content by publishing it to SlideShare (which, in turn will be shared in your LinkedIn network if you use SlideShare official LinkedIn application):

You can also create a downloadable copy of your recap (in an eBook format) to allow various ways to access and go through your outline on- as well as offline.

3. Create an Audio Version of Your Content

An audio post comes incredibly handy (and appreciated) while you are on the go. While PDF version of your content makes it more “offline-friendly” as well as easier to use on iPad, the audio version makes it possible for your readers to listen to your articles on their iPod while on the plane or even on the beach.

I have reviewed one plugin that “adds voice to your posts” – Odiogo automates the process of turning each of your blog posts in a podcast (as well as adds the option to download your content to your blog feed):

If you want to make the process more selective and the voice less “machine-like”, there are other applications like Audacity which is free recording software.

Creating an audio version of your blog posts will also increase your exposure as you can submit your content to heavily-used podcast directories like iTunes (To submit to iTunes, go to the iTunes Store, navigate to the Podcasts directory, and click on the Submit a Podcast link.)

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Re-Purpose Your Content to Optimize it for Traveling Season

Just the other day I was talking with some bright minds in the search space and when we got to the topic of Bing the lights were on but no one was home. Which got me think about how since its launch most of us have largely ignored the MSN/Bing advertising platform, as illustrated by the small number of advertisers on Bing compared against Google’s estimated 1.5 million advertisers, due in large part to the limited consumer reach and previously very poor functionality. And while it’s still a few months away I think it is high time we start thinking about how we manage search in Bing and want to share with you 5 things you’ll need to know to find success with Bing.

• Dynamic Text Insertion: Most advertisers are familiar with Google’s dynamic keyword insertion function that allows an advertiser to take the search query and dynamically insert it into ad text. Bing takes this feature to a whole new level. Not only can you dynamically insert the search query into the ad but you can also conditionally insert other pieces of text into the ad or display url. For example, if the search query is red roses you could insert the word red rose into the ad text but could also make a condition that shows a price of $24.99 when the search query is red roses but $19.99 if the search query is yellow roses. Proper use of this should improve relevance which will help improve CTR and/or conversion rates.

• Scheduled Bid Adjustments: On both a campaign and ad group level advertisers can both increase or decrease their bid levels based on geography (by city, metro,. state/province, country/region), demographics (age and gender), day of week, user device (mobile or desktop/laptop) and time of day. This requires marketers to really understand their underlying core business metrics but the marketers that know their metrics and understand these features can heavily skew the Bing search landscape in their favor.

• Bing Uses Quality Score Metric: While this doesn’t come as a surprise to many it is important to note that Bing also uses a similar metric to Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo’s Quality Index (they call their metric Quality Score Unfortunately this is one area that is pretty crappy in Bing. At this stage Bing doesn’t display quality score that ties to a keyword, ad, or account. However, there have been some instances we’ve heard of that in order to establish high quality scores bids have been increased by 2x which have driven bids down in the mid to long term. Note that everything we’re hearing is that Bing is in alpha or beta of rolling out Quality Score for advertisers.

• Search Management Tools: Microsoft’s adCenter has a tool similar to Google’s desktop tool (Adwords Editor) that resides on an advertiser’s local machine. The name of the tool isn’t the most original – Microsoft adCenter Desktop but  the tool has some great functionality
  • Extract keywords for your ad group based on a URL or MSN’s keyword tools
  • Ad distribution (search vs. content) and geo-targeting and add ad group-level negative keywords
  • Similar functionality to the excel plug-in described below.

On top of their desktop application adCenter also offers an excel plug-in feature with features that provide deep keyword research insights. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.

Screenshot of Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

• Dedicated Time and Resources: Once Bing is powering the organic and paid search results for Yahoo there reach will be extended and their resources will be more heavily focused on improving their advertising tools to allow them to increase monetization per query. The advertisers who will win in the land grab for search real estate are those who are willing to dedicate their time and resources to test and optimize Bing early and often.

It’s going to be rocky at first and there are lots of things that adCenter needs to fix such as exposing their quality index, improving their reporting interface, and many more items but with nearly 30% market share (Yahoo+Bing combined) we can’t afford to ignore Bing any longer. Check for more information about Bing in the upcoming weeks. I think you’re going to love Bing!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Things You Need to Know to Succeed With Bing

Yahoo owns only 35% share of Yahoo Japan. While Japanese Internet service provider Softbank owns around 40% of share  of Yahoo Japan. Yahoo Japan is operated independently as a separate publicly traded company with Mr. Masahiro Inoue sitting as its President and CEO while Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang sitting on the board.

Of course, the deal is not going to pass through without opposition by various groups. Microsoft for one definitely was not please with this alliance between Google and Yahoo Japan. Japanese regulators might also look at this deal in the negative way as the alliance would corner a big chunk of the Japanese search ad market. Google currently has more than 38% of the search volume in Japan while Yahoo Japan has more than 53%.   The terms of the deal as well as its date of implementation are still unknown.

So, what do you think? Will the deal push through or will Google and Yahoo Japan face some more strong opposition from other market stakeholders?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Yahoo Japan Switching to Google as Search Provider

And away we go….

Lead Story 

Are link builders SEOs?

Over the last year or so I have been talking to some friends, old and new, about the world of link building and it’s place in SEO. Or more specifically, is it actually part of SEO? You see when I talk to some folks, most often the more seasoned vets, they tend to see it as ‘link marketing’, ‘relationship marketing’ or even as a promotional activity.

And so I wanted to highlight my pal Ben McKay’s article; Homage to the Business of Link-Building – which discusses this very topic.

The funny thing is that if you’d asked me 18 months ago I’d give you a big ‘duh’ and move on. But now I have done the proverbial 180 and tend to believe that it truly isn’t purely SEO… moreso the promotional aspect than anything else. Consider social media. Just because if does have benefits to SEO, does that means it is part of the SEO fold? Not at all…that would be silly to say.

Links are considered votes or even ‘reach’ and to me SEO covers the more technical aspects and has some cross over into the world of content strategy. Now, I haven’t gone completely mad, I understand the value of links to SEO, I am merely now of the mind that it is a stand alone discipline as much as social media marketing and usability are.

And that’s my own 2c on the matter – we will be talking about this more on SEO Dojo Radio this week

/end SOSG session

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 07/27/2010

While site navigation can, and absolutely does have an impact on how well the search engines can most accurately determine the focus of a page or section of a site, there’s a reason why it’s such an important factor, one that I expect will be around for a long time to come…

Site Navigation Is A Multi-Faceted Indicator

Site navigation is a critical component of information organization and retrieval because it’s a way to

• Control the user experience (UX)
• Contribute to the quality (or lack thereof) of that user experience (UX)
• Inform the search engines how pages relate
• Inform the search engines which pages you wish to be recognized for more authority…

Navigation As A Means To Inform Relationship

Since that higher level page is also linked to from every other top level page on the site, by also linking the three lower level pages to the higher level page, we inform the search engines that, in fact, that higher level page is more important than they are.  (since they themselves are not linked to from any other high level page… more links pointing to that higher level page indicate “more important”).

Navigation As A Keyword Focus Reinforcement

Properly optimized links include keywords – both in the anchor text and the URL. If we were to “pollute” other sections of the site with all the links to the widget pages, we would needlessly be adding widget related keywords onto those pages, thus diluting their focus.

And at the same time, by having that section specific sub-navigation, we reinforce the focus of that section by having those links there – and thus adding more instances (relevant, and valid) of those keywords within that section’s pages.

Navigation As a means of controlling UX

Navigation is a means by which users find information. Through navigation, you can dictate where people go on your site. If you create a landing page for PPC purposes, you might not include links to all of the top pages on the site that you would provide to organic visitors. If you want to provide users supporting information for a primary topic, you can do so by including additional navigation specific to that topic on the page you’re looking to support. These are all examples of ways in which you can control user experience.

Navigation as a Means of Improving UX Quality

By taking the time to consider the mental model of users (the mind-set of various groups of people using the site), you make better decisions about how, where, why, and how often you link to different pages on your site. If all you care about is trying to drive PageRank to a page, you’ll throw links to it from all over the site. Which might, or might not get you that extra value.  Yet you could also be shooting yourself in the foot doing so, because, as I explained in my Rocket Science Simplified article, sometimes, from a user experience perspective, it just causes confusion from that link overload.

Site Navigation = Internal Links

Given all the ways site navigation is capable of being used, it’s clear as to how it’s such an important factor in the eyes of the search engines. Taking it even further, we can also translate this to the issue of inbound and outbound links from and to other sites.  So the next time you wonder whether or why inbound and outbound links are important, just think about all the ways in which they’re used in the same way you view internal links.

• As a way to inform relationship
• As an authority builder
• As a keyword focus reinforcement
• As a means of controlling UX
• As a means of improving UX quality

A Well Rounded SEO Understands Information Architecture

After I wrote this article and before it was published, Kim Krause Berg posted a great article on site navigation & Information Architecture for SEOs that I think does an excellent job of bridging the gaps between my last article and this one as far as helping further explain some of the more technical terms used by IA specialists. And as far as I am concerned, if you’re going to be an independent SEO, you need to be a well rounded SEO, so from this little corner of the world, it means you need to start paying attention to IA issues, including site navigation…

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Breaking It Down – Why Site Navigation Matters