8 replies to this topic

[aramyus]

I am not talking about link building but internal linking only

I am looking for ideas for re-organizing internal linking on a site with a couple hundred pages.

The traditional concept involves a pyramid going from general to more and more detailed.

Blogs use the concept of 'dense linking'

They have typically a large number of articles having a published-date and 'topics' (alias tags) at the bottom.

Blogs generate automatically a large number pages. One page for each day, each week, each month, each topic etc...

These pages are just a list of 'related items' such as articles having the tag xyz or published in March 2005

These pages are totally articificial, but Google seems to love this concept.

Is this applicable to 'regular web sites' ? How to organize the 'boosting' pages ?

[randfish]

Aramyus - I think you might have more success with the pyramid system. Related pages and products and good interlinking are important, but the search engines all use information architecture to help determine relevancy and I've seen sites benefit from optimizing in this way effectively.

Specifically, I'd urge you to check out on-topic analysis, which can be used to determine how best to structure data, anchor text and concepts to optimize for what the SEs want to see.

Check out - http://www.miislita....c-analysis.html

[Randy]

From the user perspective I would encourage you to provide some sort of Site Search capability too. Nothing at all to do with SEO, but is a big help on the usability front. Which can and does affect conversions of course.

One other small note... If possible you'll want to try to capture those searches also. You'll be amazed at the insight this data can give you in finding out what people are looking for and how they're searching. Which leads to optimizing pages for those semi-popular phrases, which leads to more qualified traffic from the engines.

It's a vicious circle I tell ya...

[aramyus]

From the user perspective I would encourage you to provide some sort of Site Search capability too.  Nothing at all to do with SEO, but is a big help on the usability front.  Which can and does affect conversions of course.

One other small note...  If possible you'll want to try to capture those searches also.  You'll be amazed at the insight this data can give you in finding out what people are looking for and how they're searching.  Which leads to optimizing pages for those semi-popular phrases, which leads to more qualified traffic from the engines.

Thanks Randy

That may be the best tip I have read for the last 3 months (analyzing the internal searches)
It sounds obvious, but I am not sure many of us do that...

Thanks again
Remy

[aramyus]

Specifically, I'd urge you to check out on-topic analysis, which can be used to determine how best to structure data, anchor text and concepts to optimize for what the SEs want to see.

Thanks Randfish
I am not sure the two approaches are incompatible
When you talk about 'on-topic analysis', I would interpret that in term of 'topics'
that a page is talking about, for example what words or concepts are the central ideas of a page

To a large extend, topics pages can be viewed as the result of a search query for the most important topics covered in a whole site

Remy

[Randy]

I didn't analyze Site Search results for years Remy. Partly because it was such a hassle to build reporting features into the site search engine and partly because it seemed like it would be such a daunting, time consuming task to analyze that much data.

Now I'm a convert and do it as a regular course of business.

I knew in the back of my mind that I should have been doing looking at those site searches forever, but even I was surprised at the quality of information one can get from that type of data. It really does give you a lot of insight into exactly what people are looking for, even if they first found you from some other, more general, initial search.

So now I don't make them try so hard to find me. Sort of like applying Usability concepts to search. I simply optimize for the phrases they're really searching on!

[Chris B]

I was just thinking about this last week, how would I go about getting this feature so I can check my internal site searches? Currently, I use Google site search on my site and I can at least see that page is being visited more than I thought.

Thanks,

Chris

[Randy]

You pretty much have to install your own search script to get the stats Chris. Or at least if there's a way to do it with a Google search bar I've never heard of it.

Most of the site search scripts out there provide some level of statistics. We've discussed some of those around here somewhere, though I can't recall where at the moment.

A couple that I've used in the past before finally biting the bullet and developing our own for internal use are iSearch and Sphider. Both of those include some stats and also a built in spider to grab the pages of your site. Both also have a free version.

[Chris B]

Thanks Randy,

I will give those a shot.