6 Technical SEO Strategy Tips for Better Traffic and Rankings [Site Architecture]

6 Technical SEO Strategy Tips for Better Traffic and Rankings [Site Architecture]

Posted by richardbaxterseo

If you think about it, search engines are more or less constantly driving us SEO people to keep our technical SEO strategy in a state of constant refinement. This "evolution" of the marketing environment we thrive in is a great thing, it challenges us to come up with new ways to improve our traffic generating capabilities, user experience and the overall agility of our websites.

Here are a few ideas (6, to be exact) based on issues I've encountered in QA or on our recent client work that I hope will provide a little food for thought the next time you're planning SEO enhancements to your site.

1)      Leverage UGC (review content) beyond the product page

UGC is brilliant, particularly on product, content thin or affiliate sites. Making it easy for users to leave a review is powerful stuff, but are you making the most of your precious user generated comments? Consider this scenario. So many users leave product reviews on your pages that you decide to limit the number of reviews visible for that product. You could cherry pick some UGC for category listings pages, adding to the uniqueness of those otherwise content-thin pages too.

2)      Use "other users found this document for"

I know Tom loves this trick, and rightly so. You can turn insightful recent searches data into valuable on-page uniqueness. Internal search and external referrals are great, but how about extending the process to make it easy for users to evaluate, extend, tag or remove terms they feel are irrelevant to the page?

This simple example shows how users of a forum site may have found that thread. I think there's a whole lot more you can do with this trick, but it's a start:

3)      Consider delivering search engine friendly URLs in your internal site search results

I know how "out there" this might initially sound, but why settle for search engine unfriendly URLs on your internal site search pages? I have seen lots of examples of links being awarded to unfriendly, internal site search URLS. Why do we spend so much time carefully crafting our external URLs, only to completely forget our internal search URLs? A little extra development work to apply a meaningful pattern to your search result page URLs to...