Optimising Site Strength

Optimising Site Development

When you begin to optimise your website, it is important to realize that there are indicators of both page strength and site strength that the search engines may take into effect to determine how relevant your materials are to answer specific queries. Page strength and site strength are related, but slightly different ideas.

Individual page strength comes from optimising the various signals that each page possesses. These signals would include the amount and presentation of relevant content, the number of internal and external links pointing to it (and the anchor text of the links), and the “freshness” of the content/activity.

Site strength comes from aggregating individual page strength attributes, combining them with some measures of sitewide usability and a variety of offsite influences.

Generally speaking, many of the sitewide strength indicators will be in place when you finish coding the site, while the page strength indicators are more malleable and might be changed more often as you develop new content.

Site strength builders

As covered earlier in this guide, you need code that is strong and surf-ready. This is step one in optimising for improved search strength. The following are additional site-wide considerations that can help you attain better search engine success:

  • Eliminate duplicate content: On your site, every piece of content should have only one corresponding URL to find/display it. Sometimes, coding inconsistencies can make a single file have multiple URLs that work to find it, particularly true when you use off-the-shelf templates or open source site-builders. When multiple URLs display the same content, it can be seen as trying to manipulate the search engines. There may not be a direct penalty for having duplicate content of this type, but it is risk worth minimizing, and something that can usually be rectified with a few hours spent on better coding. A great way to check for these issues is to run Xenu’s Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) on your site to see all the links the site holds. Xenu will quickly list all the links in your site. Make sure all links are working, and that each file has only one corresponding URL. In addition, use common sense, and don’t try to release multiple pages that all contain exactly the same content – this is much more likely to receive a penalty than an accidental coding issue. You also don’t want to take your content and simply re-release it on other sites. The search engines will tend to choose one version of a page and all others will lose.
    • Tip: Running Xenu is a smart way to see that you do not have any malicious code installed on your site, linking out to bad neighborhoods.
  • Canonical issues: There should only be one complete version of your site available to view, as in either the “www” version or one without the “www.” If both versions of the site are available, it creates duplicate content through what is called a canonical error that you need to rectify. Canonical means the “preferred” version of the site – basically, you choose one version or the other and permanently push the traffic from either request to the selected one. Canonical issues might also be used to describe scenarios where there are multiple methods to reach the same content – such as “http://mysite.com” and “http://www.mysite.com/index.html” each bringing you to the same place. Canonical issues are best handled by using a 301, or permanent redirection, to the preferred location. Refer to the <link this> description of the 301 redirect </end the link here> for more information.
  • Internal linking: One often overlooked or under-utilized technique to help build site strength is to internally link to the pages with the most value. Beyond navigation and sitemaps, by linking pages with specifically chosen anchor text, you can funnel some of the strength your site receives to the pages you select. For example, if your site is about car sales, you could link occurrences in the text of “car sales” “auto sale” and other related terms to one page with a lead form. This helps to push visitors toward conversion, and it funnels some degree of search engine strength to the lead page. The better your pages internally link to each other, the less likely that any one of them will be seen as being irrelevant doorway pages – which makes the site stronger. Make your site a mesh of well-connected information, linked for strategy and just as importantly, utility.
  • Sitemaps: There are two types of sitemaps commonly used: html sitemaps (visible to the users) and XML sitemaps (read by the search engines). Sitemaps help users find pages that might not be as easy to see through the navigation, and it tells the search engines which pages you’d like them to index. Adding an XML sitemap is not a guarantee that the pages will be indexed more completely, but many SEOs believe them to help. The search engines also suggest them as a best practice to follow. The good news is that they are relatively easy to create and maintain, so taking advantage of any benefits they offer is also easy. If the site is small, you can code an XML sitemap by hand. If your site is live, it is easy to use an automatic sitemap generator to speed-up the process. There are many free options available to help you do this, such as: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ or Google’s Webmaster tools. Some sites, depending on the depth, use multiple sitemaps. Again, these are intended to help focus the search engine bots, steering them toward the most valuable content. Conceptually, if you are linking the pages well a sitemap is less necessary – but they are a good practice to adopt, and may offer some benefit.
  • Feeds: RSS feeds are a way for you to quickly distribute your content to a wider audience more efficiently. Using a formatted XML file, an RSS feed rebroadcasts frequently updated content, like blogpposts, news items or audio and video files. People interested in a topic can subscribe to a site’s feed to receive updates as they become available. As a site owner, they are typically very little effort to set up, and make another good practice to adopt.
  • Robots.txt file: A robots.txt file is a file placed in the root folder of a directory that is read by the “bots” or “spiders” that crawl the web. It is used to tell them what to look at and what to ignore. It is a very powerful tool, so use care when creating or updating it. The robots.txt file is primarily used to have the bots skip over folders or files you do not wish to have indexed. It is important to note that some bots ignore the robots.txt file – like malware or spybots armed with malicious intent. It is also important to note that it is very easy to publicly retrieve a robots.txt file and see what a site is blocking – so this is not a crutch to be used to hide content. However, from a search engine perspective, the major search engines do respect the robots.txt file and it will have an effect on how your site is handled by them.