SEO design issues are discussed. Issues discussed include creating a long tail, keyword - in the applied experience of a mature working revenue earning website: TopXML.com

No discussion about software development can be complete without discussing what makes good UI (user interface design) and what makes for good SEO. In this post I describe some "on-page" factors that directly influence the ranking of your content on your website.

These are just a few of the factors that are contained in my free "36 SEO design secrets PDF"
36_seo_design_secrets.pdf 

Determine your general target/focus area and get it into the URL

In the case of our flagship website, TopXML, we started the website with too narrow a focus. It was initially called "VBXML". VB was an extremely popular Microsoft coding language back then. We were the only website covering VB and XML so it made sense to call the website "VBXML" because the two main keywords (VB and XML) were in the url. 

Why should it be in the domain? You may have noticed that whatever you search for, the keyword you requested is almost always in the domain name (or URL) in the top most results. I did a quick search in Google for "UI Design". Here is the first result.

What are the odds that the BEST website on this topic actually owns the exact URL? I think the likelihood is that someone else is far better at this topic but has a URL that says their company name. But you can't argue with what you see above, the highest ranking result is the domain name itself.

What should you do if you can't get the keywords into the domain? Here are two strategies:

Firstly - and most importantly - you must make sure that you put the content onto a suitable domain which is "on topic". That means don't put athletics content onto a technology website. You must keep your content on topic, because search engines look for "themes". It read the entire website to determine the overall theme. Then it reads pages to figure out the sub-theme. I will explain elsewhere in more detail how Google figures out themes by using "on page" factors.

Get the keywords into the page url. The domain is the .com part, the url is the directory and the name of the page. Be sure to put the exact same words in the TITLE, H1 and the URL. If the engine sees the same words in all three spots, then it concludes it knows exactly what this page is about.

Take a look at how the same words are used in all instances on a real page on TopXML. Here is a user-generated page advertising a job position. This is the view of the top of the page, where the title and h1and url are displayed:

Notice that we have the exact same keyword phrase in all three places. Now take a look at an actual page which was recently created and ranked by Google...

Take note of some things about this result. You can see that the age of the page is only 12 hours old and it already ranks #1 right away for that search text. The search text is present in the title of the page AND in the URL of the page AND its in the text that Google found on the page.

(These are "on-page" factors. There are additional "off-page" factors to consider which I will write about in future posts.)

It is for that exact reason that we at TopXML put the name of the page into the url of the page. The result is that just about any page we have ranks excellently in Google right away.

There is actually NO NEED to be devious and tricky in your good SEO design. The central issue is this: design your pages in a way that ensures that the engine can determine the topic of the page. the clearer the topic, the more the engine will trust the content.

Therefore make sure...

• the content contains the keywords
• the theme is in the domain or at least in the url
• the keyword phrase is in the page name
• the exact same