Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Tips for Small & Medium Businesses

You are here: Home / Archives for Website Structure and Navigation

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101, Part 1

October 6, 2009 By 2 Comments

Establishing a Website Domain Name

Establishing a website domain name and a high PageRank on Google takes significant time, efforts and commitment. There are several factors that improve your search rankings and the Google PageRank. Two most important factors are, doing proper on-page optimization and site structuring, and getting substantial amount of high ranking relevant sites linking to yours.

For new websites it is a big challenge to get other leading sites in the industry linking to theirs. However, even those sites which have been around and doing business for years; their low rankings are an outcome of the lack of work, awareness, skills, or resources to implement the right optimization and link strategies. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, Search Engine Optimization, Website Optimization Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Optimizing Your Internal Link Structure

March 9, 2009 By 2 Comments

Having a robust link structure is very important for search engine optimization (SEO) as search engine spiders discover pages following your URL’s and index them accordingly. Putting right anchor text on the links not only improves your search rankings but also help visitors guess the content of the landing page. Follow these guidelines to improve your overall link structure:

  • Put right words that describe the page you are linking to in your anchor text (putting “click here” on the anchor tests will not bring much SEO value as compared to backgammon sets, backgammon games, or backgammon boards for the linked pages, even though they lead visitors to the same destination)
  • Links must be encoded in plain HTML even if pages are dynamically generated to help search engine spiders understand that the page will be there with the same content next time when a visitor comes looking for it
  • Put more links to your main pages than the less important ones to increase their placement is search rankings

If you are interested in learning more about this exciting area, Jim Boykin has a nice post on Optimizing Internal Link Structure.

Filed Under: Blog, Search Engine Optimization, Website Optimization Tagged With: , , , , ,

Opening New Browser Windows

March 5, 2009 By 2 Comments

Users expect new pages to open on the same window on which they were currently working. By making pages to open on separate windows, even those outside your website, you are going against their expectations.

  • Don’t make pages to open on separate windows, except when they are PDF and similar documents.
  • Think about your older and visually challenged audiences. They can’t manage many windows.

Web developers and designers are often afraid of opening the links on the same windows for the fear of losing the visitors. But that is a lost cause in any case. If people want to leave, they will. You can do nothing about it. And if they want to come back, they can always use the back button (back button is the single most used button on the web).

There are several usability problems that come from opening pages in different windows. The Usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, provides a detailed study of the associated problems in his book Prioritizing Web Usability.


Filed Under: Blog, Web Usability Tagged With: , , ,