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Today’s article

It’s no secret that search engines are very much concerned about improving their methods of analyzing website content. They don’t want to serve searchers with irrelevant pages. Their sophisticated algorithms take into account not only the content of a page where a keyword is found, but also a complex of interrelations between this page and other pages of the site, and also other sites linking to that page.

This means that it is not enough just to have a website but to present information in an organized and structured manner. As a rule, when SEOs are talking about establishing and supporting a website theme, they discuss optimization of a website’s directory structure and page cross-linking or siloing. We’d like to add a few simple concepts that are often skipped by SEO professionals because they are so obvious.  We suggest that a newbie keep in mind the following three main aspects of site structure optimization as a theme factor:

1. Optimize every page as a document with a definite (quite rigid) structure that search engines expect to findns
2. Optimize your website’s directory structure based on the principles that search engines (and the SEO community) recommend, and
3. Optimize cross-links to emphasize keywords and themes that your important pages are optimized for.

A good page is a well-structured document

So logically, its elements have higher or lower importance. A page title is the most important and concise information about your page. Page headings are also important, but not as important as the page title, and texts in the paragraphs are less important than headings. This means you should care about having a keyword-rich page title, headings and texts – every page that you consider important and devoted to some specific aspect of your business should be well-focused on a certain keyword and be also supported by various words that determine a more general theme.

A good site is a well-structured book

If your book is a short story, there is little reason to break it down into many chapters. Regarding a site, a complicated multi-level structure makes little sense if your site consists of 10-15 pages being subordinate in theme only to the index page. However, if you create a large site, grouping similar content into directories is a good solution, because you can set a specific theme in such a way.

Take enough time to consider your site navigation menu – it must be concise and include keywords that help you maintain theme accentuation.

As the major search engines continue to introduce different content into their search results (blended or universal search), the idea of directory siloing becomes even more attractive. It’s not only quite natural and convenient, but also good from the SEO point of view to group your movies into a /video/ folder, blog posts into a /blog/ folder and news into a /news/ folder.

Cross-linking as a theme supporting factor

Any landing page that is optimized for certain keywords will need a kind of credit – links from other pages that will corroborate the keyword and emphasize the theme. That is why you should create back-links on other supporting pages with keywords in the anchored text.

To summarize, what page elements should you optimize for a better theme support? Here they are:

• Page titles. Page visible text, especially, headings. Image alt texts, image titles. Surrounding text to support images, videos, maps.
• Page file names, directory names.
• Link anchor texts, link title attributes.

Its not a big surprise that you will find here nearly all page elements that require keyword optimization.

To understand what idea a search engine (in this case Google) might have about your site keywords and theme, enter Google Webmaster Tools and load the ‘Keywords’ report under ‘Your site on the web’. Does the Google analysis on your keyword significance match your desired pattern?

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

We’ve noticed a rise of Google in August 2010 compared to the year 2009 – it’s the leading SE referring 83% of all visitors. Yahoo is still losing visitors (it referred 7% of visitors to sites) and Bing is not in its best form (it refers only 6% of visitors). In light of the recent news about Yahoo and Bing combining, it will be interesting to see what will happen in the next few months.

Global Search Engines (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

Visitor referrer shares have slightly changed compared to last year. Search engines referred 50% of all visitors in August 2010, which is 2% more than in August 2009. Bookmarking and Linking shares are equal – they have been reduced 1% each and now total 20%. The amount of people who use paid advertising has not changed – 6%.

Visitor Referrers (%)