It’s widely thought in the world of SEO that the deeper the page into a sites structure the less importance it’s given by Google but that isn’t necessarily true.

Firstly, I’d be a little reluctant to move pages deep in the site to a more accessible location without good cause. Obviously if something works it works and there is rarely much point in trying to fix something that isn’t broken.

Not only that, but from what we’ve seen recently with 301 redirects not passing over the full authority I’d be even more wary about pulling off such a tactical SEO manoeuvre for potentially little gain – or no gain, as SEOMoz has kindly highlighted.

They suggest that:

“… people often think that URL structure signals site structure. Just because your URL is 3 levels deep doesn’t mean the crawlers will treat the page as being 3 levels deep.”

So it looks like it comes a lot down to how your site is linked internally too – both in your main navigation and links within your content.

For example, let’s look at two different but feasible URLs for an online shop. One page is several levels deep while the other sits in the root:

http://www.shop.com/paper/post-its/yellow /square.html and
http://www.shop.com/paper-post-its-yellow-square.html

Just because you’ve created a page in the root for page it doesn’t give it any more authority in the eyes of the search engines. You could have all of your pages sitting in the root thinking you’ve created a flat site architecture but you haven’t.

It all boils down to the way the page is linked to that creates the site’s architecture. A page that is linked to 3 clicks away from the home page but sits in the root is considered to be 3 levels deep and is given a lower authority, whereas a page 3 levels deep in terms of URL architecture but is linked to on the home page is considered to be only 1 level deep and is given more authority.

Google still has to crawl your site by following links and if a page that is important to you isn’t immediately accessible within a link or two it will be devalued, in the same way that having a page that isn’t easy to find for your visitors suggests that you don’t really find it relevant to actively ‘push’ people to seeing.

In short – a prominent page is an important page. Whether it’s for visitors or search engines, it’s important.

There are, of course, other arguments when it comes to using long URLs as opposed to those in the root, some of which can be seen over at SEOmoz.

In your quest for search engine dominance it is often easy to overlook certain areas within the vast sea of SEO techniques and ranking factors. This can sometimes be down to a lack of an all-round knowledge of SEO, being fed poor quality information or just lack of experience in particular areas of SEO.

Either way, I’ve created a short list of factors that could be affecting your ranking that you may have overlooked for whatever reason and should be looked at seriously (and addressed wherever possible) if you are looking to improve your SEO campaign.

Server Down Time

A site that is frequently inaccessible is a turn-off for any potential buyer. It doesn’t give a good impression and it means that when they do want to buy something from your site it could potentially go down at any time. Google sees this and, in its efforts to provide the highest possible quality search results, isn’t going to list a site that is only available 70% of the times it tries to visit.

If your site is selling anything you should be spending at least some of your profit on providing the best possible user experience and ensure you are doing everything you can to convert your visitors. If one thing stands in the way of the shopping experience it severely reduces the chances of that buyer coming back. They’ll just go elsewhere.

Linking to Poor Quality Resources

Poor quality links that come into your site are devalued and won’t affect much in the way of your rankings, but it appears to be a very different story when it comes to the sites you link out to.

At the end of the day, if you are linking out to a site you deem it a worthy resource for your visitors to visit. Google looks at this as a way of measuring the authenticity and authority of your site. Obviously a site that has any degree of authority within a particular niche will know of some great resources that would be useful to a visitor and potential buyer to learn more about a product or service or particular industry.

A link to a spammy site full of duplicate content or low quality articles not only gives the wrong impression to your visitors – which in itself should be enough to want to point them to better resources – but also shows that you know your industry and are working to give the user a better user experience to help them make a better informed decision.

Masking Content

This can be done in a variety of ways, but essentially boils down to delivering one set of information, however small, to your visitors while showing search engines other information and has been used in the past to ‘stuff’ keywords into a page without putting visitors off – which, I might add, was defunct years ago due to the abuse the method received.

This can be as simple as having text set to the same colour as the background so that it comes ‘invisible’ or working keywords into the coding of the site in a way that will not be displayed to users but will still be read by search engine spiders.

There are many other factors that can affect a site and its rankings within the search engines but these are some key areas that can be looked at to help bring up the overall standard of a poorly performing site.

Most of us know that the major search engines pretty much ignore what’s in the meta description tag when it comes to ranking your site but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it completely. It now serves a very important – albeit slightly different – purpose.

Back in the day, meta tags were used to help the search engines work out what your website was about and rank your site based on how relevant it thought it was top the search being performed.

These days it is much less of a ranking factor, but is instead used to describe what your website is about within the search results, as seen below:

Google search results for an 'SEO' search showing snippets taken from the meta description tag

Although it doesn’t have an effect on your rankings within the search results, you should still put some time and effort into creating a good description that grabs interest.

Use it to attract visitors that may otherwise skip over your positions within the search results, particularly if you aren’t quite at positions #1. I don’t mean fill it with crazy characters, but make it salesy. Grab attention and pull people onto your site.

Think about what makes you unique. If you are cheap then includes prices. If you are the only supplier, make sure you include that along with what you do and what you offer. If potential visitors aren’t sure what you do after reading your snippet of text within the search results then they aren’t as likely to click onto your site and not only are potential sales lost, but the hard work that’s going into your SEO campaign is being wasted.

If Google finds that your meta description tag doesn’t describe your site accurately or informatively it will choose to pull search snippets from elsewhere, including the content on the page and external sites such as the DMOZ and Yahoo directories if they fit the bill better.

Top Tips:

• Keep your meta description tag to less than 150 characters. 100-150 is a good guideline.
• Make it precise but informative
• Grab attention with your description while getting across important details in a few words as possible.
• Include keywords. Although they don’t affect your rankings the keywords you search for are highlighted within the search results, helping your listing to stand out and spear relevant to the users search.

Most people install the Google toolbar or some other plugin that displays the Page Rank of each website so they can assess the authority of a website or a page. But should you really take that figure as gospel?

Possibly not. It is possible to ‘fake’ the page rank of a site and when it comes to link building you want to make sure you are getting the full benefit of every link you build.

Firstly, let’s ask the obvious question – why would somebody try to fake their Page Rank?

It obviously takes a certain kind of person to mislead the public for financial gain. Maybe they are looking to sell their site and want to push for a higher price. Maybe they sell links on their site and again want a higher price per unit. Maybe they just want to appear as an authoritative source of information.

When you think about it, there are many possible reasons for wanting to inflate your Page Rank value, all of which are very misleading to the public and result in financial gain for the owner.

Still, help is at hand and you can check up on this. A quick search in Google for ‘check fake page rank’ or similar will bring up plenty of results that have ways of checking whether the PR of any site or page is real.

Simply enter your URL and it will run a couple of checks to help give you confidence when it comes to adding a link to your site on somebody else’s page. Pages with fake PR are quickly highlighted.

Quick, simple and effective.

Would you trust your own website if you were a visitor? It seems a bit of a strange question to ask yourself, but it’s something that is often overlooked when it comes to trying to get more of your visitors to get in touch, enquire, or place an order.

I realise this touches upon a similar topic area that I write about last week, but have been reading more into this subject and realised how much can be done to optimise the website in terms of user interaction and the psychology behind it.

With a constant inflow of visitors coming to your site, you want the website to do as much of the work as possible, so that when the visitor does pick up the phone they are ready to part with their money.

It’s worth taking some time to step back and look at your website the way a visitor would see it and ask yourself a few questions, just as a visitor would subconsciously tick off boxes when they peruse your site;

Does the site appear to be an authority in its field? Think about brand identity and whether it fits the target audience and their expectations of your brand and products. This also follows through into the site’s design and the quality of content.

Look at your prices. Do they reflect the type of audience you want to attract? You don’t want to appear too cheap but you also don’t want to price yourselves out of the market.

Make sure the content appears to be written by an expert or enthusiast, and not by an amateur and make sure it doesn’t appear to be shallow and unknowledgeable. Rushed and partial content that doesn’t answer the users questions could potentially lose you a sale, recommendation or repeat visit.

Do what you can to ensure the content on each page is as ‘bookmarkable’ or ‘shareable’ as possible. Better still, ask yourself ‘would it get printed in a magazine’?

Ask random people who haven’t seen the site before if they trust the website and if they’d be happy to give their credit card details to the site. Make constant changes based on their feedback until the majority say ‘yes’.

As simple a mistake as it sounds, you’d be surprised how many times I come across a site that have spelling or grammatical issues and, once fixed, have shown considerable signs of improvement in terms of the volume and quality of online enquiries received. A poor quality site really puts people off.

A good idea might be to run Google Optimiser for a few months, running two slightly different versions of the site side by side and work out which provides a consistently better conversion rate. Once you’ve got a clear winner, roll out that version of the site to the public and run a second test with further changes made, rolling out the new winner until you have a site that sells in your sleep.