Saturday, February 28, 2009

Understanding The Components of an SEO-Friendly Page

Creating or Building an SEO-friendly web page that ranks well and is easily seen by your customers can be a real challenge for the SEO webmaster, especially if there is a lot of competition for your keywords or phrases. Building an SEO-Friendly site certainly doesn't happen by accident. It requires a deep understanding of the various elements that search engines examine and how those elements affect your ranking. It requires an understanding of what elements search engines examine and how those elements affect your ranking. It also requires including as many of those elements as possible on your site. It does little good to have all the right meta tags in place if you have no content and no links on your page.

It’s easy to get caught up in the details of SEO and forget the simplest web-design principles — principles that play a large part in your search engine rankings. Designing is the base of search engine optimization and it plays a very big role in seo work for any site. Having all the right keywords in the right places in your tags and titles won’t do you much good if the content on your page is non-existent or completely unreachable by a search engine crawler Understanding which of your pages are likely to be entry pages helps you to optimize those pages for search engine crawlers. Beginning with Entry and exit pages, these are the first and last pages that a user sees of your web site. It’s important to understand that an entry page isn’t necessarily the home page on your web site. Entry pages are important in SEO, because they are the first page users see as they come onto the web site. The typical web site is actually several small connected sites. Your company web site might contain categories, for several different topics. Say you’re a health insurance company owner. Then you’ll have various insurance plans within your sites for consumers. Each health insurance plan will have a main page — which will likely be your entry page for that section — and several additional pages leading from that central page to other pages containing relevant content, products, or information about specific topics.

Because entry pages are important in the structure of your web site, you want to monitor those pages using a web-site analytics program to ensure they are working the way you expect them to work. A good analytics program, like Google Analytics, will show you your top entry and exit pages. Exit pages are those from which users leave your site, either by clicking through an exit link, selecting a bookmark, or typing a different web address into their browser address bar. But why are exit pages important? They have two purposes; the first is to drive users from their entry pages to a desired exit page. This is possible with implementation of proper navigational scheme. There’s an added benefit to understanding the navigational path of your users. When you know how users travel through your site, you can leave what’s called a bread-crumb trail for them. That’s a navigational indicator on the web site that allows them to quickly see where they are on your site.

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