Once you have an understanding of the basics of search engine optimization and you have implemented those things on your website, then it is time to learn some of the more intricate things about Search Engine Optimization. Get out your notepad and a pencil.

URL Structure: This is an area that many people overlook. The problem is that people usually do not have the knowledge of how to properly build their url structure when they are building their site and no one wants to hear it after the site is up and running because if they have done it wrong it can be a tremendous undertaking to go back and fix it. However, I am going to tell you the proper way to build urls and let you determine if it is worth it in your circumstances to go back and make the changes.

To make the best use of the urls, you should name each page after the keyword phrase for the page. Use dashes as your space. So the proper url for a page that is targeting the keyword phrase of “Halloween craft ideas” might look something like this: yoursite.com/halloween-craft-ideas.html. With each level you drill down into the site, you should maintain the same concept. Some of you may be asking about dynamic urls. The answer is that you should make every effort to make all urls on your site static. There are many individual circumstances that may prohibit that, but do everything that you can to make as many pages as you can static. In cases that you cannot make the link static, then you can use the canonical link element in the head section of the page to tell the search engines the preferred version of the page. For example, a page with tracking code that might look like this: yoursite.com/halloween-craft-idea.html?sid=asfd945693 might use a canonical tag in the head section that looks like this: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.yoursite.com/halloween-craft-ideas.html”/> This will take care of those pesky dynamic urls.

Canonical Issues: This issue is simply a matter of making sure that you are not splitting the link juice coming into your site. A real easy example is this: http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com. To your visitors it is the same site, but to the search engines, it is two totally separate domains. It is entirely possible that websites that have not corrected this issue are splitting link juice from their link building efforts between the two domains. Correcting this is fairly easy. First, you can do a 301(permanent) redirect from one to the other. You can also make sure that you are consistently linking within your own internal links to the same versions. You can also set the preferred version in your Google webmaster tools. Another method that Google will recognize is your sitemap upload through the webmaster tools. If they have any indexed pages from your site that disagree with your sitemap, they will give preference to the sitemap url that you provided in the sitemap. In the end, if none of these solutions will work for you, then you can always use the canonical tag in the head section of the page that is having trouble.

Indexing Issues: You should use the XENU tool to determine what the potential issues are if you are having trouble getting a particular page on your site indexed. You can do this by using a tool call XENU. This will allow you to determine what links are broken on your site. By finding the broken links on the site, you may discover why a page has not been indexed. You can also check your robots.txt file to determine if any pages that you would like indexed have been inadvertently blocked by your robots file.

The indexing issue may seem a bit simple, but the major issue that can happen from pages not being indexed that should be is a significant lack of internal links that you thought you should have. If you find some troubles and then fix them, it can have a big impact on your site and its rankings.

Smart linking: If you have done any search engine optimization, then you certainly know that building links to your site is incredibly important. However, how many people approach this in a smart way? The answer is, not too many. First things first with this link building efforts. You absolutely must make sure that you have mapped out your keywords to the particular pages that you are targeting. Without this, you are just throwing together a mishmash of ingredients that is not likely to turn out well.

Next, you need to understand that there are lots of places in your link building campaign that will only allow you to link to the homepage, so you should take every other opportunity to link to the interior pages of the site. You also need to make sure that you link using variations of your keyword phrase to the page so that it does not look fishy to the search engines.

Use a variety of link building tactics so that it looks more natural. Not every link will count the same, but it is important that you get multiple types of links. In other words, getting all your links from directories or all from blog posts, or all from social media sites will look fishy and will not work as well as when you have a nice variety.

Also, the link structure within your own site is very important in your rankings. The search engines look first to the internal links and the anchor text within those links to determine what the pages that they link to are about. They use external links to verify what you have already told them about what the pages are about. If you have not correctly used the keywords in the anchor text to link to your internal pages, then the external links that you build will not agree with the internal links and your pages will not rank as well as they otherwise could.