Website structure optimized for search engines by Mark Nunney, 15 August 2007

A website with ambitions to support even a modest business will need to plan for hundreds, soon thousands of pages, and all that content has to be organized for users and search engines or it might be lost to them both.

If organized, both users and search engines will easily find related content and both will be happy. Such organization is simple – here’s an introduction on how to do it...

Create ‘categories’ to which your content can be allocated. For example, on a business management site – thinkingmanagers.com – the categories include:

• management style
• management theory
• quality management
• business strategy
• business management
• business development
• corporate culture

Each of these categories has a home page – a category page (aka a ‘cat page’) that introduces its subject and lists links to relevant pages on the site.

As new pages are written and made, they are allocated to appropriate categories and are listed on those categories’ pages. For example, the page in the following link is the ‘business strategy’ page from thinkingmanagers.com - it lists links to all pages on the site relevant to ‘business strategy’.

The two grabs below show first the copy introducing that page’s subject, and then some of its links to relevant page...

A category page introducing its subject:

Relevant pages listed on the above category page:

It is not, of course, a coincidence that those categories from thinkingmanagers.com match the keyword niches used when we looked at keyword research and SEO strategy. This is why I'll often say that keyword research is site structure planning - your target keyword niches become your site's categories.

You can then use Wordtracker to give you ideas for relevant new content to write. Using ‘business strategy’ as the example shows below, Wordtracker tells me that the following keywords containing ‘business strategy’ – ie in the ‘business strategy’ keyword niche - are amongst the most popular searched.

Each of those listed keywords (and Wordtracker lists up to 1,000 for each search) is a potential idea for a new page. For example, I could commission or write articles on ‘small business strategies’ and ‘e business strategy’ knowing that they would be targeting popular keywords.

If I was to write and optimize one of those articles on, say, ‘small business strategy’ I would first do another Wordtracker search with those words and yet more keywords to target would be revealed - see the following grab:

Now we can see how our SEO process starts to come together:

• With keyword research we find a prioritized list of keyword niches to target (our SEO strategy).
• Those keyword niches become categories on our site - the major part of our site's structure.
• Within each category - ie within each keyword niche - we build content to target that niche's child keyword niches.
• There are many ways of generating content, but…
• One search on Wordtracker can give you up to 1,000 ideas.
• Ideas become pages - optimize your pages.
• Just one page can successfully target over 10,000 keywords.
• Optimized website structure needs an accompanying optimized site navigation.
• Last but certainly not least, we must promote our content and build inbound links.