This post aims to help you structure your entire site for search engines before and during development. This is by no means the be all and end all of SEO, Structuring or best method out there but is the personal effective method that I use.

To begin, when preparing to develop a site what steps do you take? Do you jump right in and just start coding your .psd or alternative? Maybe you just build using your coding application and use minimal graphics? Whatever method you use I will try to explain why methodical structuring can make or break your new shiny website.

Up until recently I myself coded all my pages into the root folder of my hosting package and tried naming them accordingly. Using this method my websites always did quite well as they are coded very clean and Google liked crawling them but I soon realised I was missing one fundamental practice and so began a test. Enter Firstplaceingoogle.com.

I originally bought this domain name of a friend in an attempt to simply place a holding page with a link back to my main website I.M.A.G.E Ltd but decided to create a specific site offering SEO services as the domain suggests. This project I decided would be a trial of my new method away from my usually well indexed structure. Panic Time!!

We all know Google is the biggest and best engine to get the right listings on so I was to focus solely on that and optimise the site and structure entirely with Google in mind. To begin with I took out my trusty notepad and pen (You can get these from most places but I chose to go to the local high school and kick down a kid smaller than me and took his pencil case along with freshly decorated notebook – Bullying is bad and I do not recommend it unless you really need to do so).

So.. I knew that my website was going to have an index, a prices page, timeframe page and enquiries form so a simple site and good basis for this post. My notepad scribble was a little like this.

homepage
- - - prices
- - - - - homepage
- - - - - timeframes
- - - - - enquiries
- - - timeframes
- - - - - homepage
- - - - - prices
- - - - - enquiries
- - - enquiries
- - - - - homepage
- - - - - timeframes
- - - - - prices

Having my pages structured like this enables the user to have complete access to all of my pages from any page they visit. On top of this I decided to include a breadcrumb on top of each page. Now,  Firstplaceingoogle.com doesn’t really need this as it is a relatively small website but… I felt it good practice to include it anyway. The breadcrumb would be like so:

You are here: Home » PAGE YOU ARE ON

As you can see, not the most complex breadcrumb you will see but it does the job it is intended to do. Now it was time to begin creating the code for my pages and add SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to each of my pages.

Now, again this is not the gospel way to do things but I have never been a fan of simply copying others work so I simply do things my way and this is one of them (If it’s not broke, why fix it?). So my SEO structure would be a bit more complex than my paging structure and would be like so.

<META>
<H1>
<PARAGRAPH>
<H2>
<PARAGRAPH>
<H3>
<PARAGRAPH>
<H4>
<PARAGRAPH>
<H5>
<PARAGRAPH>

Notice the pattern? Simple isn’t it? on top of structuring my individual pages like this I was to give each header a title like so <h1 title=”title here”>Header Here</h1> and also each link would gain the same treatment. It is also great practice to never use simple text within your links such as “click here” or “click me”. Instead and in my case i was to use links such as SEO Search Engine Optimisation Enquiries this would make it even easier for Google to index the site and its internal links.

Within each paragraph it is good paragraph to constantly link your chosen keywords within a readable format. What this simply means is that you can link a large amount of paragraphs together using your chosen keywords in nice sentences to ensure the engines do not see it as spamming.

Also important are the meta tags you use in the head of your pages. The ones i used are as follows:

<meta name="description" content="First Place In Google.com offer Search Engine Optimisation,
 SEO Services, Keyword Analysis and Keyword Suggestions for your website" />
<meta name="keywords" content="First Place In Google, Top Of Search Engines, SEO Services,
Search Engine Optimisation, Optimization, SEO, Website Keywords, S.E.O, Keyword Analysis,
Keyword Suggestions, Search Engine Reports" />
<meta name="distribution" content="Global" />
<meta name="rating" content= "Safe For Kids" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c)2009 firstplaceingoogle.com." />
<meta name="author" content="First Place In Google" />
<title>Prices - Google Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Services. First Place In Google</title>

This is a structure that I believe to be highly effective but again is not a chapter in the best selling book “Gospel ways to do things on your website” by Web Jebus.

Now onto the more important things. Does this method work? Well the honest answer is at the moment YES!! Since I launched First Place In Google I have been tracking its progress within Google and i am now happy to say that in just under 2 weeks I have made the second page (Update: Around 24 hours later and I now have the site on the first page on google. Proof that my system works.) for the search term “first place in google” which is no mean feat by any means. After 1 week I was placed on the 5th page so I have managed an 60%+ increase within a 7 day period.

I am still tracking the site daily to find my rankings for other keywords but I must also appreciate that there are lots of sites in this field doing the same kind of practice which obviously means a fight to reach the top. I have also implemented this method on my main portfolio site I.M.A.G.E Ltd which is a much more complicated structure and not yet indexed with the new structure by Google. I will closely be monitoring this and posting the results here. Go take a look.

I hope this post helps you in the structuring of your website and I look forward to your comments on how to better the system or what results you have gained using my methods. Making a comment takes seconds so go ahead tell me how juicy I am!!

Tags: CSS, design, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Website, website design, Website Structure, XHTML

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 9:29 am and is filed under Design, CSS & Xhtml. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.