Untheming on-page optimization
Visit any major news or media site and you’ll like find that its front page is a hodge-podge of links and/or snippets from stories buried deeper in. There is no such thing as “theming” on the front-page of a successful large site. Conventional wisdom in search engine optimization for years has been to “theme” your pages, silo your sites, and keep like content with like content.
A typical well-established blog may have 15-20 categories and perhaps as many tag sections. The blog’s front page, however, may look just as jumbled and disorganized as a news site’s front page. SEOs don’t really practice what they preach when it comes to blogging, and yet there are quite a few blogs that have become very successful SEO resources.
On-page optimization should never have been confused with the topic of relevance. Theming should never have become the foundation of an entire field of SEO theory. Siloing is about as necessary as dipping your fingers in chocolate before you sit down to eat buffalo wings.
A page should be coherent. That is, it should make sense to the average visitor. The page’s content should seem reasonable. That doesn’t mean you cannot or should not link to your insurance affiliate link farm site from your gardening hobbyist site. Home gardeners need insurance, too, and you’re perfectly free to link to whatever sites you want to link to.
The link should make sense, however. If you’re just burying that link in a hard-to-find place where you don’t expect anyone but a search engine to see it, you’re doing it the wrong way. Be proud of your outbound links. Show them with grace and style. Surround them with text that explains what you are doing. Or at least don’t hide them.
Not every outbound link has to be to something relevant to your on-page content. An open link is an honest link. Let the visitor figure it out.
But neither does all your content have to be about your page’s topic. After all, many sites include boilerplate text such as disclaimers, copyright notices, and similar incidental copy. If including that stuff on your pages doesn’t hurt you, then why should embedding a harmless joke in the margin hurt you? So on your home gardening site’s front page you could include a little box that says, “Two Ents walked into a bar but the third one ducked.”
It’s not like there is some law or search engine guideline out there that says every thing on your page has to relate to one single specific topic. The idea that you have to segregate your content to assert relevance is absurd. In fact, it borders on the insane. That’s like saying all purple cars can only use highway 12 and the rest of the traffic has to follow the Rainbow Color Guide signs, too.
If you have a large Web site with a few dozen content areas, it’s okay to tell people on every page about some of the other content sections your site includes. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve never been penalized and I’ve achieved highly competitive rankings. The occasional, “By the way, did you know we also sell Bar-B-Q sauce?” internal ad on a page about rice candy doesn’t hurt your visitor experience.
People get caught up in the concept of focusing their on-page copy on selected keywords and forget that it’s a Web site they’re building, not an index card with notes for a pop quiz. You can mix it up, jumble your topics, make your pages more interesting, and leverage your real estate to help people see that, hey!, there’s more to this site than just a great discount on designer perfumes.
Some Web sites go for the Las Vegas Effect. In fact, I’ve done that myself. You embed so many cross-promotional links and ads on a page that visitors sort of tune them out. I think there is a balance between not telling people about other content and inundating them with promotions, ads, and links.
Search Engine Land is a typical Las Vegas style Web site. Most of its marginal ads are just page clutter, no doubt getting some click throughs (even I have clicked on a couple) but mostly just ignored by the news-hungry visitors.
Search Engine Journal is another signpost site built in the garish Las Vegas billboard style. You get more ads and links on the front page than actual content.
Neither of these sites is hurting for traffic. Neither of these sites has been penalized by the search engines, or lost their competitive edge. Danny Sullivan and Loren Baker have proven that ugly works (a principle near and dear to my heart, as many of you know).
There are plenty of other examples out there of successful sites that mix up the content on their front pages.
The deeper content can be equally mixed. Amazon, for example, throws in all sorts of content on a typical product page (that page is for one of my books). I cannot think of a more exemplary Las Vegas Style site than Amazon. It has so many cross-promotional links that on some product pages I feel like the main content has been nearly buried.
Fear of being penalized or losing competitive placement paralyzes many SEO copywriters and technicians. On-page optimization really has nothing to do with keyword density. You improve your relevance through repetition and emphasis, but you don’t need to minimize the number of topics you include on a page to ensure search engine success.
It’s time for people to start experimenting with their content. It’s time for people to begin untheming their pages. SEOs don’t need to bury their heads in the sand any longer. It’s a brave new search world, waiting to be conquered (at least explored) by the bold of heart who don’t allow fear and superstition to dictate their strategies to them.
www.seo-theory.com
published @ October 23, 2008