• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Prioritizing content for search, people, and you

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 25, 2008 in Content Theory

When you have more than enough content you need to figure out which content is the most important for you, your visitors, and other shadowy figures on the periphery of your visibility. Contrary to popular assumption, the root URL for a domain is not necessarily its most important page. Contrary to current SEO myth, an “About Us” or “Contact Us” page is very often the most important page on the site. Try avoiding a “Contact us” page the next time you run a local search.

People occasionally want to know who is in a company’s executive team: folks like students, reporters, potential investors, stockholders, financial analysts, etc. So here you have a Fortune 1000 company asking you for SEO advice — ask yourself this question: just how stupid do you want to look to your client? Do you really want to tell them their “About Us” page isn’t important?

Value is not determined by SEO pundits who latch on to stupid ideas and promote them in blogs, forums, and search conferences. Value is determined by the people who create content and by the people who search for that content. If you don’t make it easy to find content on the Web, you don’t need to put content on the Web.

I was sitting in the audience one day when Matt Cutts looked out across hundreds of SEO faces and said, “Your site only gets so much PageRank”. I knew in my heart that as soon as those words were digested and regurgitated that many horribly bad SEO schemes would be devised to influence how the PageRank should flow.

PageRank flows through links, not through short-sighted schemes. But priorities are not so easily shaped. For example, people often visit Amazon’s root URL as a starting point for product searches. Amazon, on the other hand, uses its front page to promote specific products and features. It’s a rare person who says to him or herself, “Hey, I wonder what Amazon is promoting on its front page today!” I’ve no doubt there are people who look out of curiosity, but most Amazon visitors are either searching for something specific or they are following links from other sites.

Amazon’s dedication to cross-promotion helps underscore just how valuable cross-promotion is to any Web site’s success. You cannot rely on search to show people what is most important to you. You have to show people what you want them to, and relying on silly link tricks to manipulate the search engines to do that for you is not very effective. If nothing else, you can change your on-site cross-promotional code in the blink of an eye but you have to wait for multiple lag times to expire if you try to do this through search.

So when you sit down to prioritize pages on a Web site, keep in mind that you have at least three sets of priorities to contend with: yours (or the site owner’s), visitors’, and search engines’. Search engine priorities are driven by a combination of queries and Web valuations. “Web valuations” of course are all the things that search engines take into consideration, like links and content on your site and links and content on other people’s sites.

Your priorities must come first. If an SEO tells you, “Hey, just block out these pages with Javascript or Nofollow”, ask them how that drives traffic to those pages. If you sacrifice search visibility for a page (for any reason), you need to provide an alternative method for getting traffic to it (and Javascript or NoFollowed links don’t count). In other words, if you streamline the value-passing capabilities of your internal navigation you need to compensate for the lack of search visibility by creating some other type of visibility. Internal navigation is not enough.

You should not be putting a page on a Web site that you don’t want someone to visit. Even if it’s a signon page, many people actually bookmark your login URLs and use them to get directly to your service sections. As long as you make your login URLs bookmarkable you should have no problem with allowing them to be indexed by search engines. If you’re obsessed with the notion that too much PageRank will accumulate on your login pages, then be sure to include links to other portions of your site on your login pages.

Visitor priorities should come after your own priorities. You are showing people what you want them to see but you also want them to find what they are looking for. That means making everything you have visible to search OR visible through alternative methods. Just because a page has few links pointing toward it doesn’t mean it’s not important and that people won’t visit there. I have plenty of pages I promote through non-search vectors and they get a lot of traffic.

How do you help people find content if you’re blocking it from search? You can create section guides, scrolling indexes, miniature guides that popup when people click through your site quickly, or other special content that exists only to help people learn more about your site. Your Error 404 document should act like a miniature site map and point people to your on-site search tool, your HTML sitemap, and your primary section guides.

In fact, why stop at 404 error handling? If you have a lot of dynamic services you may benefit by modifying your default error documents to help people report errors, find stuff in alternative ways, and otherwise help your off-road visitors get to some useful destination.

And then finally we get to search priorities. While it may seem counter-intuitive to negotiate search priorities after the first two types of priorities, search engine optimization begins with understanding what you have to offer and knowing what people are looking for. You cannot prioritize for search before you prioritize for yourself and your visitors.

But now that you’re ready to prioritize for search you need to get off the root URL. There is more to your Web site than your front page. Too often people want one page to rank for many expressions. Many SEOs pay lip service to the admonition to spread their optimization across multiple pages but when they go link building they reveal the true limits of their vision: most so-called “optimized” links point to the root URL.

You can achieve far more with your PageRank if you point your inbound links at multiple destinations rather than just at your root URL. Even if you get enough PageRank flowing to your site to ensure that 100% of your pages achieve maximum search visibility, it takes longer for that to happen than if you distribute your inbound link love across multiple internal pages.

SEOs today tell each other not to create content more than three clicks away from the root URL. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to such a philosophy. If you have a good site search tool it won’t matter if your content is 15 clicks from home. If you have inbound links pointing towards popular content that is 15 clicks from home people will find that content and the search engines will find that content.

So when SEOs talk about good site structure you can separate the beginers from the professionals by applying the “three clicks from home” test. Anyone who adheres to that policy is not a professional. Where your content exists in your site hierarchy is irrelevant to how you shape its search visibility. All you need are links, but all the links on the Web won’t help you if you point them at the wrong pages.

Site hierarchy needs to be managed for more than search. Usability limits suggest that you’re going to cube your site at 10-12 links. That is, the average visitor can handle up to 10-12 links on a page, so if your root URL links to 12 other pages on the site each of those pages can only effectively present 10-12 links to your visitors — and if you’re following traditional SEO advice at least 2 of those links will point back to your root URL and your HTML site map.

You can break off cubes and have a large Web site that consists of loosely interconnected cubes, each acting like its own miniature site. By loosening the architecture you free yourself from primitive thinking and move into the arena of optimizing for the whole site as opposed to optimizing for the root URL. When you start organizing your content in specialized sections which each promote their own content from within (while maintaining a strong but thin connection to the whole site through HTML sitemaps, site search, and/or links home) you can develop comprehensive link building strategies that focus on promoting the content rather than accumulating or driving PageRank.

You cannot hoard PageRank and you cannot sculpt PageRank but you can look like a damn fool if you try. On the other hand, you can develop link profiles for sections of your site and help drive traffic to strategic sections by cutting out the middle pages. The search engines will see this, understand it, and work with it. They drive traffic to deep content all the time. You just have to understand that you need to show the search engines that the deep content has value.

And that means you have to show other people that your deep content has value.

And that means you have to believe your deep content has value.

When you believe in your deep content you’ll do what is right and necessary: you’ll make it visible, rather than try to hide it.

And that is how you prioritize content for search because that is how you optimize for search.