Information Site Architecture

SEO Theory: Structuring Website Content

Have you wondered what is the best strategy in SEO to target an extremely competitive term and a locality based keyword to follow. For e.g. lets say you want to target “Used Cars” and then “Used Cars Sydney”. The old SEO 2.0 way was to keyword stuff the meta title; USED CARS – USED CARS SYDNEY – USED CARS MELBOURNE. Now in this new 5.0 world in which we are entering, how we structure content can get us effective rankings for each keyword.

Top Level Structure

Top level pages should contain the most competitive and keyword rich content available on your website. The most generic (keyword rich) and unique content should be within the top level pages with the basic SEO strategies applied such as H2′s, <strong> tags etc. and so forth. Once we have established multiple general top level sections on the website such as /used-cars/ and /new-cars/ for examnple, we then contextually link out to http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/used-cars-sydney.php from within the content to a locality based section. In this case Sydney.

Second Level Structure

After linking out to http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/used-cars-sydney.php, we optimise the accordingly, meta data optimisation, body content tweaks, footer links and so forth.

Third Level Structure

After linking out to http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/used-cars-sydney.php, we  then link out to a individual product pages to do with a used in Sydney. For e.g. /used-cars/sydney/used-car-corolla_22.php and list the product details, cost, make, model. The URL would like this in the third level state:
http://www.domainname.com.au/used-cars/sydney/used-car-corolla_22.php

The SEO power of contextual links may be up for debate but from theory, practice, and experience we know that a link in a context is much more powerful than an isolated (sitewide) link in a sidebar. It is logical to think that internal linking should also be done with the help of in text link rather than navigation menu.