If you haven’t completed day 5 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 5: Evaluating Your Keyword Difficulty before starting this post.

“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”

- Fred Brooks -

This is where you make your site SEO friendly

Before we go anywhere else in this course, I want to remind you that all the lessons we just went through represent all the homework you are supposed to do BEFORE you go and see your web designer, and not after!

Today, we are going to take all the keywords we have selected, evaluated, grouped and analyzed, and organized them to start mapping our site structure and optimization strategy.

3 Tiers Structure

If you are not familiar with site structure or web design, I invite you to read my post “Improve Your Crawling Rate”.

Search engines spiders on your site are like a man in a shopping mall.

As long as you have a main alley, shops on the left, shops on the right it’s cool to go around that, but if I have to start to go through one small door, and another one, and another one, I quickly become confused of what is where, and more importantly, I lose interest in finding out.

The same concept applies with search engines spiders, if your navigation is too complex or too deep, the crawler loses interest to visit or index your pages.

Keep it clear and keep it simple, it works both with the search engines and your human visitors too!

That being said, the site structure we are interested in is the one called the 3 Tiers Structure.

In this type of structure, no page in your site is further than 2 clicks away.

This is not only good for the search engines, but also good for your visitors, which is very important.

Here’s the summary of such site structure:

• Tier 1: Index page
• Tier 2: Category pages
• Tier 3: Content/Products pages

By now, you may have already noticed that this is looking strangely familiar with the exercise I gave in Day 4: Grouping Your Keywords…

Mapping Your Site

From this point on, use whatever tool is convenient to you, be it imaging software, mind mapping software, pen and paper, iPhone, etc…

Tier 1: Index Page

The first tier of your site should be your index page, or homepage.

Remember the keywords you grouped as your niche keywords, the ones with volume over 100,000? These are the ones you want to put in that box.

Now, I also need a dominant term for my homepage that will allow me to optimize simultaneously for as many of my keywords as possible.

In my case, I have 2 keywords “nail polish” and “opi nail polish”; obviously there’s no need (and it’s not recommended either) to use “nail polish” twice as it’s already part of “opi nail polish”.

By choosing OPI Nail Polish as my main keyword, what I accomplish here is:

• Optimizing for OPI Nail Polish
• Optimizing for Nail Polish
• Optimizing for OPI Nail
• Optimizing for OPI Polish
• Optimizing for OPI
• Optimizing for Nail
• Optimizing for Polish

I’m doing all of this at the same, staying true to my niche “Nail Polish”, yet optimizing for a term that is much less competitive.

So here’s my Tier 1:

• “OPI Nail Polish” will probably be my page title.
• “Nail Polish” and “OPI Nail Polish” may be my H2 tags onpage.

Tier 2: Category Pages

Much less thinking here since we already have established our categories previously; however we want to make sure that they all are linked from the homepage of your site:

For categories like “Nail Polish Colors” and “OPI Colors” we’ll apply
the same blending technique as for the Tier 1 keywords, ideally making sure that those categories pages are linked to using the different variations of keywords to cover them all from different locations on your site.

Tier 3: Content Pages

This is where you list and link all your content keywords.

Just follow the same procedure you have been using for Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Special Note for e-commerce sites

There’s another Keyword element you must be very wary about for your product pages, and that’s the buying/commercial intent of a keyword.

Understanding this difference is what makes a site converts like crazy, or one with a lot of traffic not selling anything.

There’s a huge different those 2 keywords:

• Nail Polish Remover
• Nail Polish Removal

In this example, it’s quite easy to spot the difference, if you are selling a product, you must optimize for the first keyword as people who search for “nail polish remover” are looking for a product; while people searching for “nail polish removal” are seeking for information on how to remove nail polish!

So make sure that your content will match the intention of your visitors!

There’s a neat free tool available online to calculate for you automatically the commercial intent of keyword: Detecting Online Commercial Intention.

URL Structure

Based on the diagram you just produced, you should be able to map your URL structure too like this:

/
/nail-polish-colors
/black-nail-polish
/china-glaze-nail-polish
/…

/opi-colors
/opi-nail-colors
/opi-new-colors
/…

/fingernail-polish
/nails-polish
/nail-varnish
/…

/nail-polish-remover
/nail-polish-remover
/nail-polish-removal
/…

/nail-hardeners
/nail-hardeners
/nail-top-coat
/…

Exercise

Today’s exercise is to use your keyword research from Part 1 to produce 2 maps of your future site:

• One graphical map, that is visually appealing and easy to
  understand.
• One text map that will provide you with the recommended
  SEO URL structure for your site.

At this point, even if you weren’t to complete the other lessons of this Site Structure Mastery part, if you were to produce these information to a web design firm, you’d already slash down the cost of your service by half at least.

Not only you’d be saving money, but you’ll also be sure to get a site structure that does what you need it to do.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts below.