Good Website Construction Principles | Basic Website SEO

OK, so to give some sort of perspective I thought it would be helpful to understand my approach to basic website construction and on-site optimisation. The main focus of this blog will be to look at external promotion and marketing of your website but my aim is to provide a little background here. My usual approach to a new website or a re-design is a pyramid type structure with pages funnelling upwards to give overall emphasis to a website. If you have a quick look through my test site www.number-ones.co.uk you will see this 3-tier approach in action as I based the whole site on this model.

This is really a rule of thumb more than anything. Some of the sites I have worked on have only 2 tiers where the 2nd 'Sub-Topic' tier is not included. These are usually sites with fewer pages.

1st Tier
The first tier is basically your home page, or main theme. This is the main focus of your site and the most general keyword you are targetting (one or two word phrase).

2nd Tier
The second tier (if its required) is a sub-topic which in most cases looks more like a list of focused topics or a directory of third level pages which all fit within that category. In relation to my Number Ones site, this is the equivalent of selecting a year or an artist to see a list of number one hits that occurred in that year or a list of hits for that particular artist. This is the 2nd tier which gives access to the third bottom tier by way of links.

3rd Tier
The third tier is the main content of the site. This features the most focused content detailing the exact single product, service or detailed piece of information to the visitor.

The theory of building a site in a pyramid is that each tier receives a 'push' from the pages underneath it, with the 1st Tier receiving the biggest 'push' because it has so many relevant pages underneath it in the 2nd and 3rd tiers. In the case of my Number Ones site the actual search 'number ones' doesn't actually feature first page in Google. The main reason for this is inbound links but this site was more for testing structure than anything else so building links has not been the priority. However, a search on the newly named Bing though shows the structure alone with very few links can still be very effective: http://www.bing.com/search?q=number+ones&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all

The real power of the structure in terms of Google becomes more apparent on the second tier with this site. A search for 'Madonna Number Ones' for instance features highly in Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=madonna+number+ones&btnG=Search&meta=

I generally use this principle on every site I build and so far to good effect. That's not to say that there maybe other effective structures but this is one that I found has worked for me.

Hopefully this gives a quick overview on the kind of website structure which can provide a good organised layout that search engines will like and will generally perform well if your keywords are well researched. And this brings me to my next topic... In my next blog I'll talk a little more about researching keywords and other elements on your website pages to look out for if you want to make sure your pages work well in search engines.

xgzktybf6v