Saturday’s Question and Answers – Happy 4th of July!

Good day, everyone.  Well, another work week is behind us—and hopefully, you’re relaxing on a fine holiday Saturday morning.  It’s Q & A time; so sit back, put up your feet, and let’s get to it.

Question #1:  What is better for search engine rankings—deep site architecture or a flat site architecture?

Flat or horizontal website architecture spreads the content out allowing search engine spiders to easily locate and index content pages.  It allows for relevant in-text linking that is easy for the spiders to follow.  Deep or vertical site architecture makes it more difficult for search engine spiders to follow the links and fewer pages will get indexed.

Flat architecture is much easier for your human visitors to use as well.  Spread it out and provide plenty of navigation options for both your prospects and the search engines.

Question #2:  I am starting a link building program, what are the key ingredients for search engine rankings?

Well, that can get to be a pretty long list so we’ll start with the basics...

1.    Be sure to use your targeted keyword as the anchor text.  This will add relevancy to the link in the eyes of the search engines.  For example, if your keyword is “holiday vacations” then use that as your link.

2.    Link relevancy to the topic of the page is vitally important.  Need an example?  If you are in a finance niche, a backlink from a fitness site will not hold much importance.  A link from a financial institution provides needed relevancy.

3.    Almost all backlinks are useful and some search engines use a global approach to linking where all are weighted into the algorithm.  Others only consider links within your niche or industry to be relevant.

Have more questions on how all of this link popularity stuff really works?  Just give us a call at WSpider.com and we’ll be happy to go over the ins and outs of it all with you.

Question #3:  My website traffic is increasing, but Alexa is not showing the results.  Is Alexa an accurate way to measure traffic?

Alexa calculates traffic from the number of users with their toolbars that visit a particular site.  It then takes that number and “guesstimates” what the traffic results are.  As most internet users have no need to install the Alexa toolbar, the results can be skewed quite dramatically.  Alexa can be a good guideline, but the rankings aren’t foolproof.

That’s it for this week’s Q & A installment—have a great rest of the weekend!