Back in a former life, or at least that’s how long ago it seems, I was an object oriented programmer. Before your eyes glaze over, if they haven’t already, let me explain the basics before I get into how that’s relevant to SEO.

In an object oriented world everything is represented by an object, or an entity. So for example, an object could represent Dogs. Should you want to refine it further, you can do what’s called subclassing, and create an object under Dogs that represents Jack Russells, etc. But the real basic point that I want to ensure that you understand, is that an object represents only one type of an entity, and represents it to the best of its ability. There you go, that wasn’t too painful, was it?

So how does this relate to SEO? Well, if you consider that each page on your site could be considered an object, you want to make sure that each page only contains information about the topic at hand. For example, if you have a site on animals, you will want to have a separate page for Dogs. Should you want to refine it further, you could have a page on Jack Russells, etc. But why do you want to have only information about a particular topic on a page? Well, the Search Engine algorithms look for relevancy of the on-page items, as well as the incoming links. If your animal site talks about Giraffes, Marmosets and Jack Russells, how do they know what the main topic is? That’s why you need to break your site out into pages on each topic that you want to aim for. Breaking your site down into these topic specific pages and sub-topic specific pages allows you to really target keywords for each of your topics and sub-topics, with the search engines being able to know and understand the topic of each.

So just like in objects in Object Oriented programming, each page on your site should represent one entity, and do it well.

Filed under: SEO on Monday, August 27th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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