Understanding What a Search Engine Sees as Keywords
In this section, we take a step back first and talk about what search engines really see as keywords. When someone enters a search query, the search engine looks for those words in its index.
The preceding list gives you some of the clues a search engine would use to determine your site’s keywords. They are not listed in order of priority, nor do they represent an exhaustive list. All mystery aside, the search engine’s main goal is to give users the most relevant results. If a search engine cannot clearly connect a user’s query to keywords on your web page, it won’t include your site in the search results.
Planning Subject Theme Categories
Search engines rank individual pages but they do look for overall site‐wide themes in determining how relevant your web page is to a search query. As a general rule, the home page should use more broad‐range terms, and the supporting pages should use more specific and targeted terms that help support the home page.
By using this method, you enable the search engines to understand and index your site’s contents because this is the organization they’re expecting. And better indexing means better inclusion on search results.
Choosing Landing Pages for Subject Categories
You should organize your website into categories not just because it’s neater that way but also so that your site can rank well for any of its subject themes. Rather than having all inbound links point to your home page only, you should create an array of highly targeted pages representing all your categories. For each subject category in your website, you want to choose a landing page.
Organizing Your Primary and Secondary Subjects
Search engines look for depth of content. Your landing pages should each have at least three or four pages of supporting information that they link to. These subpages need to be within the same theme as the landing page that they support. Having several subpages linked from each landing page that all talk about the same subject theme reinforces your theme and boosts your landing page’s perceived expertise on the subject.
Understanding Soloing “Under the Hood”
Now that you understand the importance of grouping content on your site, you might be wondering how to accomplish it. If you have a gigantic website with thousands of pages that need to be reorganized, don’t panic. You can do your soloing in two ways.
Consolidating Themes to Help Search Engines See Your Relevance
In order to rank well in search results for a particular keyword phrase, your website must provide related information that is organized in clear language that search engines understand.
If so, you have a high likelihood of achieving high rankings and attracting site visitors who are researching and shopping for products and services that you offer.
As we mention of this miniboom, we often explain the importance of creating subject silos by using the analogy that most websites are like a jar of marbles. A search engine can decipher meaning only when the subjects are clear and distinct.
Last word
Both of these cases may be preventing the search engines from seeing your web pages as relevant to your keywords. If your website is not currently ranking well for a keyword phrase, consider both possible causes. You may have too little content for a theme, in which case you need to increase the number of pages that contain keyword‐rich content on that subject