You built your site to generate revenue—and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site design is crucial.

All of the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will reward your site for good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site design or penalize it for poor SEO site design.

Your competitors understand this, you need to as well.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site design?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site design is a method of highlighting important keyword content for your site. For example, if you sell fruit you would want people to know you are an expert in fruit. What good SEO site design does is tell the search engines you are.

A poor Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site design for someone selling fruit might look like this:

Site A - Fruits Page – Offers a short intro paragraph along with a bulleted list of product offerings:

• Apples – We sell many types of apples including Granny Smith, MacIntosh and Winesap
• Oranges – We sell many types of oranges including seeded and seedless
• Grapes - We sell many types of grapes including white and red

Things search engines look for in a good SEO site design include:

1. Depth of content on a topic.

If you sell fruit you not only want to mention you sell fruit but since many people will also search for apples (keywords of granny smith apples, macintosh apples, winesap apples and others), grapes or oranges you need to create depth explaining your knowledge in each area. We refer to those as keyword content silos. By combining the keyword content silos on apples, grapes, oranges and other fruits you have positioned your site as an expert in that topic. If you position yourself as an expert in many fruits the engines are more likely to see you as an expert in fruit and more likely to place you at the top of the results pages.

For our example then this would be more appropriate:

Site B - Fruits Page – This page is a general introduction page linking to the following pages:

• Apples – we sell many types of apples including…
  • Granny Smith (page of content on Granny Smith)
  • MacIntosh (page of content on MacIntosh)
  • Winesap (page of content on Winesap)
  • List more apples with a page of content for each
• Oranges – presented same as apples
• Grapes - presented same as apples
• Present all fruit in this manor

The difference between site A and B is site B is a much deeper site with more content on its topic. If you were Google site B would rank higher.

2. Keyword Selection is an important element of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site design

A well done Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site design will use the keywords in many crucial areas for the search engines to see, some of those include:

• URL’s
• Title tags
• Headers

Using our fruit site again as an example, let’s take a look at which keyword we might select for a Granny Smith Apple.  Based on data collected from Google here are some recent monthly search numbers:

So which keyword should be selected for the URL?  Granny Smith is the most popular but how competitive is it?  If our competitors currently have deep, well established sites we will need to carefully select which keyword we pursue if we want to have a top ranking for that keyword. Let’s do a quick search on it and see.

Based on this search we can see the strength of the competitors with a tool we use to help us with that. What we also would need to know is the strength of the existing site for the fruit company we are optimizing this page for. If we opt not to use this keyword we would need to do the same research on the other Granny Smith results.  Since we can only use one of the keywords in the URL, we’ll need to make a decision.

This same process, along with other steps we haven’t revealed here, will be done to determine each keyword used. You can only assume your competitors are doing the same level of analysis.

Contact us to review the complete outline of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Site Design Steps.