SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

Understanding entry and exit pages

Entry and exit pages are the first and last pages that a user sees of your web site. It’s important to

understand that an entry page isn’t necessarily the home page on your web site. It can be any other

page where a user lands, either by clicking through search engine results, by clicking a link from

another web site or a piece of marketing material, or by bookmarking or typing directly into the

address bar of a browser.

Entry pages are important in SEO, because they are the first page users see as they come onto the

web site. The typical web site is actually several small connected sites. Your company web site might

contain hubs, or central points, for several different topics. Say you’re a pet store. Then you’ll have

hubs within your sites for dogs, cats, birds, fish, and maybe exotic animals. Each hub will have a

main page — which will likely be your entry page for that section — and several additional pages

leading from that central page to other pages containing relevant content, products, or information

about specific topics.

Understanding which of your pages are likely entry pages helps you to optimize those pages for

search engine crawlers. Using the pet-store example, if your home page and all the hub pages are

properly SEO’ed, you potentially could be ranked at or near the top of five different sets of search

results. When you add additional entry pages deeper in your web site structure (that is, a dog-

training section to the hub for dogs), you’ve increased the number of times you can potentially

end up at the top of search engine rankings.

Because entry pages are important in the structure of your web site, you want to monitor those pages

using a web-site analytics program to ensure they are working the way you expect them to work. A

good analytics program, like Google Analytics, will show you your top entry and exit pages.

Exit pages are those from which users leave your site, either by clicking through an exiting link,

selecting a bookmark, or typing a different web address into their browser address bar. But why

are exit pages important? They have two purposes; the first is to drive users from their entry

pages to a desired exit page. This is called the paththat users travel through your site. A typical

path might look something like this:

SERP ➪ Home ➪ Women’s Clothing ➪ Product Pages ➪ Shopping Cart ➪

Checkout ➪ Receipt

In this example, Homeis the entry page and Receiptis the exit page. By looking at this navigational

path, you can tell how users travel through your page and where they fall off the page. But there’s an

added benefit to understanding the navigational path of your users. When you know how users

travel through your site, you can leave what’s called a bread-crumb trailfor them. That’s a naviga-

tional indicator on the web site that allows them to quickly see where they are on your site, as shown

in Figure 3-6. This is the navigation path shown on the Wal-Mart web site. You can quickly see

where in the navigational structure of the site you’re located.

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Part II SEO Strategies

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