Structure & On-Page Optimization

Site Structure
Your site should have a simple and effective navigation, making it easy for a simple person to reach every page of interest. For the spiders, navigation in plain HTML is handy and having a sitemap even handier.

The point is that you should make it easy for both potential customers and search engine spiders to discover all the goodies on your website, because if they can not do this easily, they will leave.

The technology used to create a website may also create certain problems. It is widely known that Framed sites, Dynamic sites and Flash sites do not do well without taking special precautions. The search engine spiders cannot crawl through these sites because the spiders read HTML, and these sites all use neat tricks or use no HTML which confounds the spiders. The damage can be reduced, but these are extra steps (extra costs!).

Determine on-page optimization points
These are the places where the keywords could appear.
We are talking about;

• Inbound link text. Links to the pages should contain keywords that refer to the content of the page.
• Title. The Title of a page should not leave any doubt about the main theme of the page.
• URL. Using keywords in the URL might give a slight advantage over a similarly optimized page without the keyword in the url.
• Descriptions. Use your main keywords for the page here together with secondary keywords.

Body Text. Remember Content is King. The keywords relating to the page should appear a couple of times.

• The no frames tag. Very usefull for framed sites, but then again, why use frames?
• Meta Tags. Not as powerfull as they used to be, but still important in some engines.
• Header Tags. These are used to give importance to certain text.
• Alt Tags. Text that is shown when images are not available.
• Text Links. Links are important.
• Frame names, Graphic File Names and Comment tags can be used but their effect is not major.

The amount of times a keyword appears on a page determines it's keyword density. Too low a density and the search engine will not recognize the page as being relevant for the keyword. Too large a density and your page could be considered spam and be subject to a penalty (lower positioning).

So it is very important to check the keyword density. Most optimization tools available today are able to do this, so use them.