Whether you’re an SEO professional or a training beginner, executing some advanced on-site optimization techniques is a fairly straightforward process. The main idea is to be somewhat creative in the way you use keywords throughout your website content. The trick to being effective is to develop a cohesive structure of pages that are both optimized for keywords Y creatively organized regarding your keyword goals.

The actual keyword optimization process involves how we use certain phrases in specific areas of the page, such as the page title, meta description, headings, strong tags, body text, etc. In this article, I take a step back to recognize the actual site layouts, or optimized page layout, that contribute to higher SEO performance.

Organize optimized pages

The way you plan and structure the organization of your pages is a key aspect of on-site SEO and optimization. In a general sense, you want to focus the optimization of each page on a single, precise keyword goal and perhaps a couple of variations. However, you can dig a little deeper into the page planning process by strategically creating an optimized architecture of keyword-relevant pages.

Creative organization of your optimized pages can have a far-reaching effect on your SEO efforts. By this I mean structuring the pages on your site to be based on the contextual relevance of your site (or ‘keyword relevance’).

Let’s say we’re optimizing a hair loss site for a new keyword category around “hair loss treatment.” We will most likely create a new page optimized for that particular keyword; however, we can take optimization one step further by creating a series of support pages.

Depending on the nature of our website, we may wish to implement additional pages that focus on hair loss treatments for men, women, natural treatments, etc. The idea is to set optimal keyword relevance by creating a new level of pages that target more long-tail keyword variations.

Optimized page linking

In addition to the way we organize our pages, we also need to consider the way we link our optimized pages. Proper linking of such pages can have a major SEO impact and sometimes lead to more exposure in search engine results.

The important thing to keep in mind is to make sure that the linked pages are relevant to each other. For example, if we optimize a page for “hair loss treatments”, we can include a link in the content that points to other deeper pages, such as “natural hair loss treatments” and “hair loss treatments. for men”. all good as long as the link makes sense in the content of the page (often in a paragraph that is related in some way to the link).

There are two forms of linking to consider when linking related optimized web pages on your site. They are:

• contextual links– Links that are created in the copy of a page, such as in a paragraph of text
• crumb trail links– Links representing the various page levels, often seen above the first header of a page (typically on all pages of the site)

The crumb trail links are fairly straightforward and will often be embedded throughout the site. Implementing crumb trail links is a great SEO move as it ensures that all relevant pages are linked to each other based on the user’s path or overall page depth on the site.

Contextual links should be created with users in mind. Before linking in a paragraph of text, ask yourself if the link would make sense from a usability point of view. This underscores the importance of contextual relevance when creating internal links. If the paragraph or block of content is about a certain topic, make sure that the links to that content are somewhat relevant to the text.

Take away point

When you look at well-optimized websites, they are often very deep and rich with valuable content on numerous pages. Often each page has decent keyword optimization for a specific search term, and each page is often organized into a certain category of keywords.

One of the best analogies for on-site optimization is creating a textbook. The title or focus of the story is supported by numerous chapters, and each chapter is supported by numerous sections. The textbooks that are chosen for students are those that are well organized and offer a great deal of information. Keep this in mind when organizing and optimizing your website pages.