How a page is ranked and how SEO should be applied to a site and it's navigation.

Here is a fairly brief explanation of how pages are ranked internally on a site and how to optimise your SEO to help rank your whole site.

First we must understand the dynamics of how a page is ranked to understand how a site as a whole can get ranked and do well on the serps. Google looks at each page individually on a site. Of course having your main page with a high PR and lots of good links pointing to it will help your inner pages right? Yes and no. As I said each page is ranked as it's own enity so let's look at this for a second. If your main page has a lot of juice and you have a direct link from your main page to an inner page then chances are that the inner page will rank fairly well. However an inner page that is ranked from a sub page begins to loose some of that juice and so on. The basic philosophy here that many newbies and moderate SEO's sometimes miss is that a page ranks based on quality links and on page SEO. PERIOD! This could be quality links internally or externally, they all work the same. Think about that for a moment.

So if you have a page on your site that is not linked from any other page on your site it will not be found. Right? Not true. If you have an inbound link to that page from a link with the same amount of juice as your home page link would have then you should rank just as well with that page as you would have if you had linked it to your home page. Make sense?

Now when setting up a site navigation a perfect scenario would be to have a main page with 5 links pointing to sub pages. You work on building links to not only the main page but to the 5 sub pages as well. These should be your most important pages on your site. Now any links that are sub linked from any of the five subpages should also rank fairly well if you have built backlinks to these pages properly. See how this works..

Now finally if there is a page that is buried deep and you want it to rank becuase it is a money page then simply build some quality inbound links to this page.

This is how you get a site as a whole to rank well understanding that Google views each page as a seperate entity.

Hopefully mods make this a sticky as it explains a lot of questions that get asked all the time.

Peace Todd

 

Nobody thought this post was useful?

 

Its nothing like a ground breaking discovery you just revealed. It's basic SEO. Build quality links and the page will rank!!! And how did you come up with the 5 sub page theory? Why not 3 or 4 or even 10?

 

I guess you did not read the post. ... 5 is a good number not taking to much rank from the main page, 10 would draw more rank and one well that would be fine if that is all you needed. The poin of the post was to show people how site flow is important and that just sendin all your links to the main page is not the right thing to do. You need to build links to sub pages. As stated in the post Google ranks pages not sites and that is what many seem to miss. If you read the information in the post you will see that I explain this. I agree it is basic SEO however many people miss the fact that basic SEO always goes back to site navigation and building link quality in the right manner.