Drilling Deeper
While drilling deeper may be a contentious subject in other areas it is a good thing when Google does it. Google is consistently making updates to the way they index content and in the month of May they released the MayDay updates (they also have funny names like MayDay and Caffeine).
The big thing that MayDay changes, or at least makes more important in the way Google ranks search results, is the ranking and indexing benefits of deeper links within your site. Google is trying to better understand how content on your site relates to other content on your site and to see that your site has lots of related content. Often this happens with links to definitions or by linking very specific content to less specific content on the site and vice versa.
The Google MayDay update stresses the importance of good navigation in a website. By judging website relevance based on the linking structure between content on the site they are stressing that content must be linked together in clear ways. This goes beyond just menus and leads up to tools like breadcrumbs and a strategy for how we link content within the content of a site.
Breadcrumbs help users find where they have been to get to your content. For example Home -> Blog -> Specific Post or Home -> Products -> Widgets -> Red Widgets -> Red Widget 9000. You can see a breadcrumb on the top of this page. With the content management system that DDM uses this is done automatically based on rules that we build for your site.
Having deep links within content requires creating a content management plan to do it well. Anyone creating content inside your organization needs to be aware of how the content on your site impacts SEO and is empowered to link to content inside the site to maximize ROI on the content we create.
The goal of SEO is to go get ROI on content. Your investment is the time it takes to create the content, the actual cost of the delivery of that content (amortized site creation, hosting, maintenance and other costs.)
All of this may sound challenging and complex and to some extent it is. The biggest way to leverage the changes in MayDay is to plan and to build a site that leverages that plan.
