Search engines are like librarians working in the worlds biggest library. They love well organised content. It makes their job easier. And their job is to find the customer (web user) the information they are looking for.

Imagine a reference book, like an encyclopaedia or a text book on a specific subject, with no table of contents or index, the chapters printed in a random order that’s only been borrowed three times in the last year. Now imagine a reference book on the same subject with more pages, a well structured table of contents, index, footnotes and bibliography that’s been borrowed over 100 times in the last year.

This is how search engines view your website. If the content is unorganised, the search engine gets confused and moves on to the next reference book looking for something that makes more sense. If your content does make sense, is well organised into a structure that search engines can understand and is well regarded by your peers, the search engines place a big green tick next to your site and moves it to within easy reach for future reference.

So to be taken seriously by search engines the key factors are content, structure and popularity.

Content

It’s often been said that content is king. What does this mean?

In a nutshell, Google loves websites that offer well-written, well organised, meaningful content to an audience. Google also loves content that is updated regularly.

Couple this with giving your audience the content they really want by doing some research into the keywords they are using to search and you have a winning formula that will attract more traffic to your site.

Structure

Structure refers to the structure of each page on your site as well as the structure of your site overall.

Page Structure

Google will look firstly at the domain name, page title and first heading on a web page to determine it’s relevance to the words or phrase being searched for. EG: If you search for “sports trophies” on Google (in Australia), #1 will be “A Class Sports and Trophies”. The domain name, www.aclasstrophies.com contains one of the keywords. The page title is “A Class Sports and Trophies” as is the first heading on the home page.

All three key elements contain the words being searched for.

Site Structure

The traditional structure of websites has been to build a home page and then a series of other pages that link directly to the home page. However, what we know now is that Google loves content that is organised into "themes" or "silos" that run two or three layers deep. So if you're in the business of small business software you should have a page called "small business software" under a page called "business software" under a page called "software". Make sense? It's like a well organised table of contents at the front of a really big document.

Popularity

Building incoming links from other well respected websites is like having your book borrowed, and praised, by professors and industry experts. Imagine the publicity generated if a well respected celebrity spoke highly of your business, or you were mentioned favourably by an influential trade magazine.

This is what incoming links, from other well respected sites, can do for your popularity. The more popular and well regarded your site, the higher up the food chain Google places you.