Page Hierarchy: The importance of telling Google what is important

Google SEO

Page hierarchy is simple, right?

You have a header, a main content area, a sidebar and a footer, right? You have headings and subheadings.

But is that it? Wouldn’t it be nice to know what the most important thing on the page is? How about the second most important thing? The third, the fourth, and so on?

If YOU would like to answer the question, “What is the point?”, you’re not alone. As it turns out, that is one of Google’s highest priorities when they index your page, and your search rankings will be effected by what they find.

Use headings appropriately

This is easily one of the most neglected pieces of on-site optimization, and is an easy fix if you know what you’re looking for.

On most sites, the site name gets a great big <h1> tag. Why? Because it’s the first thing on a page, and it’s usually the biggest. But is that optimal?

According to the W3C:

A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. …

There are six levels of headings in HTML with H1 as the most important and H6 as the least.

You notice that first phrase? “Briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces”. That’s important. Let me illustrate:

Example usage of the H1 element

Lets say you sell widgets, and your website is Widgets-R-Us.com. Here’s what your typical structure will be:

Example heading structure

	<h1>Widgets-R-Us</h1>
	<h2>We sell red, blue, and green widgets of all sizes</h2>

Now, ask yourself, Which phrase “briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces”? Is your page about “Widgets-R-Us” the website, or is it about selling widgets of all sorts?

The answer is, it’s about selling widgets. That’s what your company does, and that’s what your website is built to do. That means that the typical heading structure shown above isn’t optimal.

Here’s one solution to fix this:

Optimal heading structure

	<span id="site_title">Widgets-R-Us</span>
	<h1>We sell red, blue, and green widgets of all sizes/h1>

But wait, you say! Now the first line will look tiny, and the second line will look huge!

That’s the beauty of semantics. You mark up things according to what they are, rather than what they should look like. This is where Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) come into play.

By styling the <span> element via it’s #ID selector in your stylesheets, and styling your <h1> elements appropriately, you can then match the look of the original code, but retain the better hierarchical structure that we’ve just created.

But don’t stop at the H1 element!

If you apply the same approach to the rest of your page, you will soon come to the realization that most designs are flawed when it comes to proper use of its heading tags.

For instance, many blogs us <h2> elements for marking up their sidebars. Do you really want your “Categories” heading in your sidebar to be considered one of the second most important items on your page?

I sure wouldn’t.

(A heading IS appropriate, however, since again a heading should “briefly describe the topic of the section it introduces”, and it’s hard to have a list of categories without some description that says “Categories”.)

The importance of telling Google what is important

Just be sure that whatever you choose for your heading structure, you keep in mind what your main objectives are. Headings allow you to tell your users exactly what is most important to your page, but just as importantly, they allow you to tell the search engines what you feel are the most important elements on your page.

Keeping these principles in mind, along with the important principles of keyword placement, you should soon be on your way to a fully optimized site that the search engines will thank you for.

How To Get Free Websites, Hosting and Domains from Microsoft

Everyone has heard of the “free website” scams and also the legitimate but crappy websites. Many times it is just a glorified profile page or sub-domain. Either way it totally stinks for optimization. The alleged free websites are usually so full of extra code your site gets what is called “code bloat.” Besides that you usually have to pay for a domain name and they have you point it at a sub-domain. This is not good for SEO.

Real website, real domain, and free hosting

Microsoft Office Live Small Business

The best way to run your own site is always to pay for your own hosting, domain and install a free version of Wordpress. If you need to do everything for free we have a plan you can follow and still obtain success.

Why is it free?

Microsoft is very aggressive in trying to get businesses to use their service. They are so aggressive that they will give you a free website and a free domain, (both real) and also free hosting. They offer a free guide to get your website started here.

Content management system that is SEO friendly

Anyone can get this service for free except you do have to register with a credit or debit card. If you cancel your account within one year you will have to pay for it. I have had a site with a Page Rank of 2/10 hosted there for over two years for free. They have full featured contact list managers, email newsletter software and blog. The site is easy to use and easy to manage. Most content management systems perform poorly for optimization but this system Microsoft set up is great. You can control your page titles and meta description and keywords.

Office Live and Office Spaces work together

You get a live website where you can pick a domain if you wish. We did not pick one for this demonstration but just left it as a sub-domain. Click to see Optimization Tutor’s Office Live web page. Here we just i-framed this website as a demonstration. The blog for these websites is on spaces.live.com. Click here to see Optimization Tutors Spaces Live set up. You can embed your blog posts from spaces.live.com to your office.live.com account even if you chose to have a custom domain. Remember that the domains are free and they work like a real website and not a forwarding domain.

Microsoft provides exceptional resources

Microsoft provides a 5 step process for making your website look great. Click here to see it. They also have a list of pages every website should have and why. Click here to see it. They also have a fanominal resource page designed not just to help you build a site but how to run an online business. See it here. We found their help items very informative. Many times they have instructional videos also that help you with your step by step instructions.

Not just free website but whole business solutions

The important thing we want to emphasize is that Microsoft isn’t just offering a free website. They are offering an applications platform that provides everything you need to run an entire business. They have spreadsheets, doc files, reports, and everything else you would need to run an online business. Their contact manager, email newseltter manager and document manager are rivaled only by Google’s internet business applications. They both have their pros and cons. We love Google also and will discuss their offers later. For right now they do not offer free domains and Google.Pages is being fazed out.

Microsoft helps bring you customers

They have website analytics built in which includes pay per click tracking if you chose to go that route. The nice thing is their are so many other MSN.com, Live.com and Microsoft websites that easily drive traffic and customers to your site. If you answer questions in the public Q&A rooms they show up in your spaces.live.com blog which then is incorporated into your website. It works like Yahoo Answers and Linkedin Answers. Business owners and customers search in Google, Yahoo and MSN to get answers and these social Q&A pages rank well when someone else had already asked that same question. If you answers are there and especially when your answer is voted the best, then you stand a good chance of obtaining business.

Analyze your site’s performance using Firebug and YSlow

Speed is of the essence, or so the saying goes. Despite the fact that broadband is close to becoming a universal standard amongst computer users, your website’s load time plays a vital role in conversions and usability.

Matt Cutts, Google’s Anti-Spam Czar, had this to say about loading times:

As long as Google can load your web pages, it doesn’t really make a different whether the pages load in half a second or 5 seconds.

Ok, so it’s not a ringing endorsement in the quest for ever better SERPs, but the fact is that a slow site will kill your conversions faster than almost anything other than a broken page.

To aid you in your quest to get your site as optimized as possible, consider analyzing your page’s speed and performance so that you know exactly how/why your page loads are slow, and more importantly, to know where your problem areas are so that you can fix them.

Analyze your site’s performance using Firebug and YSlow

If ever there were a specific reason to use Firefox as your primary browser for optimizing your site, this is it. Firebug is a browser extension that will considerably make debugging your website a much more enjoyable experience.

With Firebug, you get a microscopic view of all of the complex mechanisms that make up your website. View the Document Object Model (DOM), edit CSS on the fly, look at what header information is being sent, and through the NET panel, you can see exactly how your pages are loading and how fast.

Need to look under the hood? Firebug is your answer

Note that there is a missing javascript file that is serving a 400 Server Error page for one of the javascripts. A missing file can really hamper your page, as often the server will sit and wait for the file, sometimes even timing out before moving on to the next part of the page.

Things like missing components on your page are a vital thing for you to fix ASAP, but fortunately, are usually a simple fix.

Why is my site slow?

To make things even better for us, Yahoo! has released an extension for Firebug called YSlow to answer just that: Why is my site slow?

Let’s see why this wordpress write panel took 32 seconds to download:

YSlow

Well there we go. Our wordpress has taken it upon itself to load us down with 185k of javascript, spread out amongst 26 different files. No wonder the admin panel is so slow!

YSlow will rate your page according to Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site guidelines. (In fact, you should probably stop reading this and head straight to that site, because the wisdom imparted from Yahoo’s experts is invaluable…)

Conclusion

A few simple changes along the lines of those recommended by Yahoo! can make a vast improvement to the speed, real or perceived, of your site. That in turn will increase your conversion and retention rates of your pages immensely.

Using the free Firebug and YSlow tools available to you as Firefox extensions can help put you and your website ahead of the game by helping you know where your problem areas are and giving you the hints you need to improve the overall speed of your site and help put you ahead of the competition.