Page Layouts That Increase Search Engine Rankings

If you have a website and are struggling to get rankings on the Engines, you will no doubt have heard the cry 'get more keywords and text on your pages then!' Whilst this sounds easy, for some sites, getting those 'extra' words on the pages can be hard, or is it?

Sure, you have a lovely site, it has some great images on it and enough text to entertain and inform the visitor about your products and services. However, when it comes to getting rankings (and therefore getting those much needed visitors in the first place) there is just not enough text.

Of course many website owners will then say "But I don't want to destroy my nice looking pages / site for the sake of getting rankings! After all, if I do that, the page may look so terrible that people leave it straight away. Thus it won't make any difference that I'm getting in more traffic!"

All this is true, you can have a very good site SEO wise, that is simply awful in getting people to stay on the site and to 'convert' in the manner that is needed. The trick is of course to lay the page out in a way that will achieve both...

This is simpler than it sounds. All you have to do is to:-

1. Use the Meta TITLE of the page to 'say' what the page is about (9 words or so)
   
   
2. Repeat the use of these words in some Header (H1 - H3) tags on the page, as near to the top as you can.
   
   
3. Make sure you use relevant words in the text around these Header tags
   
   Then and this is the trick:-
   
   
4. Use the words 'More Information' as a link on the bottom of the page to jump the user to a section at the bottom of the page (this can be 'legally' hidden using javascript if you want) which contains much more information. This information containing those all important keywords (and those like them - remember the Engines are very good at knowing what words are associated).
   
   

If you do this you'll be able to have a great looking page for the casual visitor (they not seeing all these extra words) and yet, for the really interested browser (e.g. those who just want to know more before they decide what to do) AND of course our friends the Search Engine spiders the words and information is there to see.

The spiders don't care too much where the words are, so as long as they see them somewhere, they will be happy (and so will you, as your pages then stand a far better chance of getting a ranking). And as for your visitor, well that extra information could well make all the difference and it could just make them convert.

All this achieved and you still have a site that looks great!

More next week