Optimizers Are Deep Thinkers

by Chris Lober Churchill,
Director of Web Development,
NetMechanic, Inc.

Does your Web site have just one page? It probably doesn't, so why do we treat it that way when optimizing for search engines?

Far too many Webmasters limit search engine optimization to their home page. If they bother adding META and TITLE tags to their deeper pages, they merely copy and paste the tags used on their home page.

If you want to double the traffic coming to your site, the quickest way to do so is to have more pages show up in search engine results. Optimizing and submitting pages deep within your site is the way to get there.

Focus, Focus, Focus

When first learning search engine optimization, most people make one mistake: they try to do too much on a single page.

We recently reviewed a Web site for a major online newspaper that targeted 62 keywords on their home page! While that lets them cover a lot of ground on a single page, it also dilutes the weight search engines place on any one of these words. The result is a lower keyword relevancy score.

As a rule of thumb, it's best to limit yourself to around a dozen keywords for any one page. Ideally those keywords should be variations on a theme. If you're optimizing a page selling computers, your keywords might include variations such as "computer," "desktop computer," "PC computer", and "Macintosh computer."

Spread the Joy Around

For most Web sites, the home page acts primarily as a navigation doorway to the rest of your site. Your site's real content appears on the pages deeper in your site.

Search engines like content rich pages, so try to optimize these deep pages for keywords that match their content. That's better than trying to make your home page cover too much ground.

Since you're covering different topics or covering topics in more depth than on the home page, you can use different keywords on your interior pages. Imagine, a whole new set of keywords for visitors to use to find your site in search engines. This greatly expands the available ways visitors can find your site.

4 Steps to Success

Are you ready to start improving those deep pages? Here are a few guidelines to help you on your way.

1. Pick your keywords carefully. By targeting a different set of keywords on deep content pages you expand your keyword base and your pool of potential visitors. Different people will use different search terms to hunt for the same item. You want to cover as many bases as possible. Review our newsletter on how to pick keywords for helpful tips.

2. Optimize wisely. The same optimization rules apply to interior pages as for your home page.

To double-check your work, run Page Primer over your page. It will evaluate your page from the search engine optimization perspective. Page Primer will make sure you have keywords in all the right places and will flag any violations (intentional or not) that might get you in trouble with the search engines.

3. Deep submit. Since you want to submit to multiple engines, save time and effort in this step by using an auto-submission tool. NetMechanic has an easy to use submission tool called Search Engine Starter included in its search engine optimization package, Power Pack. This handy submission tool allows you to submit any page on your Web site to your choice of 100 search engines.

Don't trust the search engines to magically find your site and crawl the entire site. Although most of the major engines now claim they will index your whole site, many spiders only do a shallow crawl and are off to another site. The Internet has grown too large to rely on luck that search engine spiders will crawl your whole site.

4. Track it. Track your progress in the search engines using Search Engine Tracker. Knowing where your site stands in the search engines is important. Achieving a good rank in the search engines is an iterative process; you may have to try different methods to improve your rankings. It takes time and patience to achieve a search engine ranking.

Having a tool that provides you ranking information saves you a lot of time. If you have a long list of keywords you might spend hours drilling through search engine results finding out where your site stands. Tracker does it automatically and sends you an email report. It can't be any easier.

Go Forth and Optimize

Okay, you know what to do. Optimize and submit those deep content pages and start watching the traffic come to you.