Generally as a webmaster you will be dealing with content laden sites and generating traffic to them, either for the purposes of making money from advertising or from the sale of your own product. One item that should be considered (but often isn’t) is how the content is arranged in terms of the network structure of the site.

An aspect of search engine optimization that is often overlooked is the way in which the search engines view the content on your site in terms of the interrelationships amongst the various elements. What I mean is, if there is a link between two articles on your site then the search engines view these articles as being related in some way.

As a side note, this can be seen with regards to page rank as an example. That is, if there is a link from site A to site B then site A’s page rank is shared with site B. The relevancy of articles is determine in a similar way and as such it is important to consider how the various elements in your site are interrelated.

One way of setting up a nice content network is a method known as content trees. The basic premise of this method is that you have one main site that sits at the top of the network. This would be the main page of your site and is the ultimate destination of your visitor and the collection point for the network.

You would then have a number of smaller sub-pages that are focused on slightly more specific topics with each page pointing back to the root page in the network. From there, each sub-page would have a collection of related but more specific pages pointing back to them.

For example, if you were to construct a content tree that is supposed to be about dogs then your main content page would be a page on dogs. You would then have, say, three sub-pages, one on Poodles, one on Shepherds and one on Dalmatians each of which point back to the first page on dogs. Then, under each of the sub-pages you would have a number of more specific pages that point back, so for example if you were making sub-pages for the Poodle page you could have a page on training Poodles to sit and training Poodles to roll over, both of which point back to the Poodles page.

This style of site structure is called a content tree because if you were to draw a picture of the network and draw lines wherever there is a link it would look like a tree.

There are a number of benefits of this network, one of which is that the further down the tree you get the more specific the content and so you are capturing long tail keywords. In addition, any page rank that the long tail pages have is passed up the tree so that the content pages that contain highly competitive keywords have more strength than the pages with less competitive keywords.