Site Directory Naming Convention
Often a new site's naming convention is dictated by the software engine or database that powers the back end. While that may be convenient for your programmer, it is not good site building practice for SEO and your users.
Part 2 – Planning With Naming in Mind
Nomenclature – A site URI web address that looks like www.your site.com/?=zlsi43yrsbc is missing a large search engine signal as to what the indicated page is all about. Compare that to www.yoursite.com/widgets or even www.yoursite.com/index.php?tpl=widgets These naming conventions are both easier for search engine spiders to understand and more importantly, for your readers to understand.
Now the "official" word from the search engines is that they parse and understand any sort of web address that you use. While that may be the case, the reality is that we see over and over that the best rankings are for sites with easy to understand naming conventions.
In competitive business niches, sometimes we are competing with other SEO teams who are matching us step for step in optimizing. We've seen that this seemingly small change (easy to setup beforehand — a ton of work once the site is already online!) can allow us to rank better.
An important part of this process is to map out in advance, what categories of site sections you are going to have. There are the obvious: about us, privacy policy, etc. pages as well as the different aspects of your business. How do you decide what to name them?
For many of the businesses that I've worked for over the years, the naming of sections use accepted industry jargon. Why not, everyone in the business uses the same language right? Over and over, I've seen after doing keyword research that the customers do not use the same words! Going with the industry jargon is costing you money.
In my opinion, it is critical to do or have done keyword research prior to deciding on your naming of site sections. If you use the words and descriptions that new customers use when searching, your site will rank higher, sooner and easier.
Plan your naming convention to be easy for customers to understand and the search engines will like it better too!
In Part 3 we will address keyword research.
Your Turn: Do you have any advice you would like to share? What tips would you like to add? Please comment below.Filed under Blog, More Content, SEO Ranking by . 
We often get called by customers to "fix" their websites traffic problems. Over the years of dealing with this I've developed a methodology that I'm going to share over the next few posts, hopefully going into enough detail to offer a thorough path to follow, for building a killer ranking website.
The overall simplified description of how to get good rankings is more content, more links. Let's dig into those concepts and then see how much deeper the rabbit hole goes.
Part 1 – Planning With Content in Mind
More Content – You probably have a core set of pages for your site that you agonized over getting just right. However, most business sites that I see have far too little content. One of the core reasons that we like blogs as your website is that they make it much easier to add more content to your site.
Fresh, unique content can come from a number of angles. There's news, reviews of others content, your take on the latest issues in your industry, new developments in your business, how to articles, expert information articles, video articles and audio articles.
You can also add press coverage that you receive, image sections, reviews, even story and testimonial sections to your website. You can have user generated content in the form of comments, and forums.
The more content you add, the more hooks you develop that might grab traffic and search engine indexing. Most people don't realize that search engines rarely index all of your site; if they do and the information isn't evergreen, it often is supplanted by fresher, more authoritative content, and then search engines will delete your content from their database.
The problem search engines face is that there is too much content being made for them to find, store and make sense of it all. It takes to much processing power and time. Many people are still coming online and creating new websites.
The bigger problem is that there's just too much crap from the article spinners, content factories, content scrapers, software generated content, multi translated content, etc., etc., all built to fool the search spiders. They cannot index it all. So search engines take shortcuts. They don't index all of your site unless there's specific signals that guide them to index it… We'll get to those later.
A good working strategy is that when you create new, valuable, interesting and unique content you attract both humans (traffic and links) and the search spiders, and that spurs greater indexing of your website.
Plan your site to have easily added sections that you will add content to. More unique content almost always gives you a big advantage over your competition.
Part 2 Directory Naming
So, what do you think?Filed under Blog, More Content, SEO Ranking by .
Websites need content and lots of it. Even more and more. One thing I notice, over and over again, is that 99% of the websites I see do not have enough content. More content with proper internal links, can raise your ranking more than any single other action that you do.
Since you must write lots of content, why not make it exciting? Or at least have a point of view. Death to Political Correctness!
The other thing I see over and over again is boring content. Writing without a point or worse, without a unique way of expression – well it's boring.
"Welcome to our website. We don't know what to say and we're ignoring how this intertubes thing works, so we're happy to shyly share our brochure site (that was out of date in 1999.) Thank Yew." Yeesh!
Seriously, how do you respond when you see one of these? "Yawn. Let's see, who else has a website in this business niche?" Click.
"The firsta rule of website writing isa — Doughna Be Boring!" (Little "Gumball Rally" oblique reference there…)
Megan Slick over at SEO Scoop just wrote a sweet little article that frames this important content topic into perspective. Her spin is about consistency – which is very important.
I apologize for my anti-boredom rant. God knows I subject my poor readers to drivel, more often than not.
Comment below.Filed under Blog, More Content, SEO Ranking by .
Blogging can seem like the loneliest thing, sometimes. Here I am, baring my soul for the world to see and "sniff" no one gives a crap! Ben Parr has a fine post on Mashable about the Top 20 Ways to Share a Great Blog Post.
Ben framed his post as a way to share great posts that you find. Okey Dokey.
However, what if your own great posts are languishing in obscurity? I think the 20 ways he shares are fair game to promote your own high quality posts and get a little action, traffic, and comment love. Let's face it, none of us wants to toil on in obscurity. I aspire to be a famous guy, that nobody knows! Heh heh.
Now here's a tip that I often forget myself. There are 99 comments on his post. In those comments are probably 20 or more great ways to share your blog posts with the world. Take the time to read them and note what additional ways might help your posts get some readership.
We all have a useful voice. Yes even you and me, and just cause we've (you've) hidden (y)our genius under (y)our insecurity don't mean it has to stay that way… Blog loud and proud baby!
How about you, what do you think?Filed under Blog, More Content by .