A well structured website with as many uniquely targeted pages as possible will often give websites more reach in the search engines. This is even more important given the fact that, a) Google will now start serving up more results from a website for a particular query and b) Google’s recent “Mayday” update will reward pages that have optimized for “longer tail keyphrases” with better rankings. So, with that being said, how do we ensure that these deeper level pages are crawled, indexed and will rank well?

Matt Cutts of Google recently stated in an interview, “… the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank”. If this is the case, then cultivating good links to your site so the PageRank flows to as many pages as possible is imperative so Google and other search engines may find these deeper level pages. Once the spiders get there, they need to see that these buried, internal level pages are targeting keyphrases that are much more exacting or “longer tail” than that of the keywords targeted on the higher level pages.

This is very important information for anyone considering Search Engine Optimization and should be taken seriously to get the best results for your site as a whole. The more you think about keyword targeting for the deeper pages on your site, the more of that valuable search engine real estate you will acquire.

Many junior SEOs or web developers may think they know SEO, but the truth is they actually don’t. Here are 10 rookie SEO mistakes that seem to be quite frequent:

1. Inaccurate Keyword Targeting: This can be a big slip-up for most people that are new to SEO. They forget to do the proper research or any at all!
2. Duplicate Content: Comes in many forms (other domains owned by website with exact content, lack of canonicalization, URL parameter changes etc.).
3. Poor Title Tags: Title tags are the most important of the meta tags (they are weighted highly by the search engines). They are either too long, too short, duplicated or are missing completely.
4. Navigation isn’t Crawlable: JavaScript or Flash based navigation is problematic to search engines.
5. Robots.txt File. Simple text file placed at the root of the domain, it tells the search engine spiders which parts of the site to index and which to skip. Sometimes incorrectly implemented or omitted completely.
6. URL Structure. Generally speaking, a good URL consists of as few parameters as possible, along with good keyword elements.
7. Lazy Link Building: Too few backlinks from “hub” or authority sites and too many outbound links to low quality or irrelevant websites.
8. Internal Site Map: Important for two reasons; for the spiders to find pages they wouldn’t be able to get to otherwise and for user experience.
9. Fresh Content. This is often overlooked. New content added to a site will get the spiders to return and index more often (it’s good for user experience too!).
10. Footer Navigation: Gives the spider another place to get to the important pages on the site and, again, is good for user experience.

Yahoo recently announced that, “Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.” This is sooner than most people expected, but what does this actually mean?

Bing and Yahoo will be functioning as two separate entities, meaning there will still be www.bing.com and www.yahoo.com, but the Yahoo organic search results will essentially be served via Bing’s algorithm. To the average user, this shift will not mean much, but to SEOs, it could potentially mean a great deal. For one thing, Bing simply do not have the same amount of data that Yahoo possesses, so the literal “amount” of results for a particular search query won’t be as robust as Yahoo’s. Also, many webmasters will notice distinctly different results in terms of ranking in both Yahoo and Bing, so webmasters who don’t get high rankings in Bing as they do in Yahoo may want to consider adopting more “Bing friendly” SEO strategies. The trouble with that is; nobody knows for sure what the real differences between Bing and Yahoo are in terms of which signals they use in their respective algorithms. As of right now, the most appropriate strategy is to study one’s current positions in Bing and see which pages are ranking better. Bing also has guidelines on how to optimize your website, such as this page for their SEO guidelines: Search Engine Optimization for Bing.