This is the third in a series of articles to help small to medium business owners get the most from their websites.

Optimizing a website to show up in search ranking, getting potential clients to click to your website and ultimately stay there and somehow “convert”, is a lot of work, that is best done consistently over long periods of time.

Most small business owners that contact me do not have a marketing budget of $700 monthly, my current entry-level package, to afford my services, nor do they want to invest a minimum of 3 months to see a return on their investment. The truth is that with some education, good organization skills and 2 to 4 hours per week, most business owners can do this work themselves. I am here, hopefully, to provide some of that education.

Content Structure

As discussed in Website Marketing for SMBs – Part 2: Website Organization we learned the importance of organizing your content through a logical navigation structure. In the same way, it is important to organize the structure of a single piece of content.

There are really 2 concepts to structuring a piece of content:

One Idea
Hierarchy of detail

One Idea

I often find myself explaining to clients, “each webpage should stand on its own.” What I mean by this is that Google indexes webpages and even though interlinking between pieces of content on a website is good and does have a positive effect on ranking, each piece of content should be a fully fledged idea, including data from other pages if germane.

Example

I was writing a series of pages on Fire Protection in Data Centres. My client had 2 different approaches to the problem. I wrote separate pages, one for each approach, and included some of the same information on both pages. I had to explain to the client that each page had to stand on its own as a fully-fledged piece of content that explained the one idea for the page. I further explained that combining the two pages was not a good idea because the two different approaches were two different ideas.

Another example may be a stonemason who does interlocking stone sidewalks and retaining walls. These would constitute 2 separate ideas and thus 2 separate pages. Each page may contain the same information about creating a base using aggregate. This way a user reading one page and not the other has the full idea from the page they read.

Keywords

This is a good place to digress into a short discussion about keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that searchers use to find information in Search. It is good to investigate what keywords clients use to find your product because those words may be different than what is commonly used within an industry. For instance, we commonly use the word cement when we mean concrete, so a searcher may type cement sidewalks when searching for concrete sidewalks.

Supporting Keywords

Supporting Keywords are words and phrases that go together with your main keywords to complete, differentiate or define your main keywords in finer detail.

Example

I have a client that sells dust collectors and if you search for dust collectors you will be served a page of dust collectors that can be bought at your local hardware store to be fitted to your saw, drill press or sander at home. Yet my client sells those big blue things on the side of factories that look like 70-foot silos. So we defined all my client’s dust collectors as industrial dust collectors. The addition of the word industrial differentiated by client’s dust collectors from those sold in the DIY market.

Other supporting keywords may define things like location, brand, type, country of manufacture, materials used in the manufacture (example: down-filled parka) or even alternative names for the product or service.

The keywords along with supporting keywords create a full concept of what product or service the webpage is about.

Where to Use Keywords

Keywords are best used in the webpage title and heading tags on the webpage. Supporting keywords can also be used in the body of a paragraph. It is also wise to use keywords in the alt attribute and captions of images.

Hierarchy of Detail

Headings

Headings are an HTML tag denoted by <h1>, <h2>…<h6>. Each heading tag denotes a finer detail of the concept denoted by the lower-numbered heading tag directly above it.

“Each heading tag denotes a finer detail of the concept denoted by the lower-numbered heading tag directly above it.”

This is an important concept and gives rise to a writing style that I call The Old Newspaper Writing Style where the main idea is expressed in the main title and as you read the article you get into finer and finer detail about the main subject. This is the way newspaper articles have always been written. Also, headings of the same number carry equal weight in relation to the lower-numbered heading above it.

The structure of the headings should look something like this:

heading 1
- heading 2
  - heading 3
    - heading 4
  - heading 3
- heading 2
  - heading 3
  - heading 3
    - heading 4
- heading 2
  - heading 3
  - heading 3

In the illustration above each heading 2 denotes equal but different finer details of heading 1 whereas each heading 3 denotes a finer detail of the heading 2 above it. The same goes for the heading 4 that is a finer detail of the heading 3 above it.

Google likes content written in this way and will rank it higher than content that is written in a hodge-podge manner without structure. Also, many users skim your content by reading the headings down the page and stopping to read the paragraph that is most important to them.

Just to be clear, each heading heads up a paragraph of content.

Overall Structure

Title

The overall structure starts with the title of the page which defines the subject of the content. The title should be limited to 60 characters. Google uses the title as a link to your content from the search results page to your content. It also shows up in the tab at the top of your browser. The most salient keywords should be used in your title like:

Home Theatre Receivers | Best Buy Canada

If you click this link you would expect to find a page of Home Theatre Receivers sold by Best Buy, available in Canada. On the webpage, you will probably find heading 2’s sub-dividing the content into brands and other headings dividing each brand into feature sets.

Heading 1

I am of the school where we use only one heading 1 per page. Since the advent of HTML5, it is acceptable to use heading 1 tags to head up each section of a webpage, both methods are acceptable to Google. Heading 1 tags should be used to expand on the subject of the title or to carry additional or different keywords important to the subject.

Heading 2 – Heading 6

These headings, as described above, are used to divide the subject into salient sections and finer sub-sections explaining finer details.

Summary

Following these guidelines results in content that is easily understood by Google-bots and users alike. It allows users to quickly find the relevant information (to them) on your webpage.

In summary:

Present only one subject or concept per webpage
Use headings to sub-divide the subject or concept into finer details

About the Author

Steve has been working in the website marketing and search engine optimization fields for many years. Currently, he is working mostly with industrial clients. In the past he has worked in a variety of fields from stem-cell research to home improvement. Steve can be contacted via email at mail@harrisweb.ca

Website Marketing for SMB’s – Part 3: Content Structure