If you haven’t completed day 6 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 6: Mapping Your Site Structure before starting this post.
“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”
- Robert Green Ingersoll -
Understanding links from a SEO point of view
Your ability to design a SEO friendly site comes from your understanding of Link juice flow and how you can leverage its power and compensate its weaknesses.
The lesson today will help you have a better understanding of what is link juice flow and how it works.
Why Link Juice Flow?
In order for your pages to be indexed (yes, remember pages get indexed, not sites), they first need to be crawled.
Using a proper site structure like we learned yesterday in “Day 6: Mapping Your Site Structure ” highly helps and increases your chances to meet this first requirement.
After a page has been crawled, if this one meets the minimum requirements of the search engines, it will be indexed.
In Google a page can be indexed either in the primary index (that is where you want to be) or the supplementary index (for the pages that are relevant enough to be indexed, but don’t have sufficient authority yet to figure in the primary index).
When it comes to link juice, only pages from the primary index in Google can transmit some; that is strictly from a SEO point of view,
backlinks from pages in the supplementary index are worthless.
You can easily identify those pages as they don’t have PR (not PR0 but really no PR).
Link juice is transmitted by links between different pages from the primary index only. Those links can both be internal or external.
You can identify pages from the primary index as they all carry a PageRank score ranging from 0 to 10.
The higher the PageRank, the more link juice each link from that page can transmit.
If you want to read more about PageRank, I invite you to read my old article Understanding Google PageRank.
If you haven’t completed day 5 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 5: Evaluating Your Keyword Difficulty before starting this post.
“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”
- Fred Brooks -
This is where you make your site SEO friendly
Before we go anywhere else in this course, I want to remind you that all the lessons we just went through represent all the homework you are supposed to do BEFORE you go and see your web designer, and not after!
Today, we are going to take all the keywords we have selected, evaluated, grouped and analyzed, and organized them to start mapping our site structure and optimization strategy.
3 Tiers Structure
If you are not familiar with site structure or web design, I invite you to read my post “Improve Your Crawling Rate”.
Search engines spiders on your site are like a man in a shopping mall.
As long as you have a main alley, shops on the left, shops on the right it’s cool to go around that, but if I have to start to go through one small door, and another one, and another one, I quickly become confused of what is where, and more importantly, I lose interest in finding out.
The same concept applies with search engines spiders, if your navigation is too complex or too deep, the crawler loses interest to visit or index your pages.
Keep it clear and keep it simple, it works both with the search engines and your human visitors too!
That being said, the site structure we are interested in is the one called the 3 Tiers Structure.
In this type of structure, no page in your site is further than 2 clicks away.
This is not only good for the search engines, but also good for your visitors, which is very important.
Here’s the summary of such site structure:
- Tier 1: Index page
- Tier 2: Category pages
- Tier 3: Content/Products pages
By now, you may have already noticed that this is looking strangely familiar with the exercise I gave in Day 4: Grouping Your Keywords…
Read the rest of this post >>
If you haven’t completed day 4 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 4: Grouping Your Keywords before starting this post.
“Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.”
- Oscar Wilde -
Don’t bite more than you can chew!
This week, we have been working very hard on our keywords, from assessing our niche, building a keyword list, refining this list, grouping and classifying our keywords, there’s one last thing to do with our keywords, and that’s evaluating their difficulty.
Before you start, you want to make sure that you are going to optimize for the right keywords in the right order, or you may just fall into the swarm of sites that are never found on internet.
The truth is that 99% of those pages are no competition whatsoever to you, especially considering how well we already have prepared our keywords already!
Your competition lies with the other people with the same knowledge as you, the people in the “know” about SEO.
Forget about KEI
One of the most popular way people use to evaluate a keyword potential is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). That’s a huge mistake.
If the core theory of the KEI is correct, its real life application demonstrates that this index is very flawed.
Your “real” competition is not the number of result pages returned by Google during a search query, that’s only the “virtual” competition volume.
SEO 101
Anybody with basic knowledge of SEO is a potential threat to you, so you need to identify those people quickly.
In SEO it’s widely known that having your keyword in your page title is crucial and dramatically increase your chances to rank well in the search engines.
Your first task is then to identify those people, and for this, Google has a command line that makes this task a breeze: allintitle.
Since having your keyword in your page title is one of the most important on-page SEO factor, we must know who are doing so.
In the search field of Google, type the following command:
allintitle: “your keyword”
The number of results returned this time is the number of pages that have your keyword (in this example “nail polish”) in their page title.
Re-open your basic keyword list and add 3 columns:
- All In Title
- All In Anchor
- Difficulty
If you haven’t completed day 3 of the SEO course, you can review: Qualifying Your Keywords before starting this post.
“If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.”
- B. C. Forbes -
Congratulation to you on your hard work
Today, we are going to use the nicely refined Keywords list we build yesterday and start to sort our keywords into different groups.
This task will give us a great head start as to how our site should be designed and which keywords should be optimized for, so be very serious with this task too.
Sorting Your Keywords by Search Volume
The very first step you should do with your list of Keywords, is to sort them by Volume.
In order to do that, just copy your keywords list into another spreadsheet with just the “keywords” and “Searches” columns as the picture on the next page.
The easiest and quickest way to sort your keyword is by using the sort & filter function of Excel.
Your keyword list should now be sorted from the keywords with the most search volume to the ones with the least search volume.
We now are going to create a new spreadsheet with 4 columns based on their search volume and copy our keywords in each of them accordingly:
- Over 100,000 – The main keywords for your site should be
within this category. - From 10,001 to 100,000 – The keywords that will define the
different categories for your site should be in this category. - From 3,001 to 10,000 – This category should contain potential
primary keywords for your posts or pages on your site. - Less than 3,000 – This category should contain potential
secondary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.
Now I understand that some niche will still be viable with a much lower traffic volume, if this is your case, just scale down proportionally the numbers.
If you haven’t completed day 2 of the SEO course, you can review: Building Your Keywords List before starting this post.
“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”
- Charles Kettering -
It’s now time to refine your keywords list
Yesterday, you have collected a list of keywords as per the suggestions of different tools and software. That’s good, but not enough.
There’s a fact that a machine is nothing more than a machine in the end.
Only you will truly be able to tell whether or not a keyword is relevant to your site or not.
Reality Check
The real success of a site doesn’t come from traffic, it comes from targeted traffic.
There’s no point to optimize your site for a keyword that has nothing to do or very little with your site, you may get some one time traffic visitors alongside suffering a loss of relevancy and credibility as per the quality of your content.
If you are offering medicals services in Denver, there’s no point optimizing for “medical services in New York” just because it’s suggested by a keyword tool.
Why Qualifying Your Keywords?
There are two major reasons as to why you should qualify your
keywords:
- As I just explained, to prevent time wasting by optimizing for irrelevant keywords.
- To reassess your “real” potential traffic volume within your niche.
How to Quality Your Keywords?
Start by opening the keyword list you built yesterday, remember your list should look like that:
