P.J. Fusco has published an excellent and very comprehensive article today on Clickz about how to organize your pages to optimize the importance of your keywords, but also on how to keep a site easy to maintain and have accessible urls.

A few quotes from this article that I found very interesting:

Using the right structure for your pages and directories:

Some Web sites contain only a few files and require a relatively simple architecture. Others are large and require a more sophisticated structure. Large or small, well-optimized sites adhere to specific naming conventions to ensure all information is readily accessible to search bots and spiders.The deeper you bury keyword rich content, the less likely search engines will find it. Some search engine spiders won’t go deeper than a certain number of subdirectories.

When building or optimizing your website, it’s important to keep a clear organization of your pages. You would prefer to organize your pages in directories rather than putting all of them under the root folder of your site. That will first allow you to keep your files well organized and easy to find when you’ll need to make changes and also, having files put in directories that contain keywords will increase the relevance of your urls. However it’s not recommended to have deep subdirectories, it will make your files hard to find and crawled less often if not linked properly.

On page optimization:

“Keywords at the beginning of the title tag are given the most weight. By leading with keywords carefully chosen for specific Web pages, you can make each site page more relevant for keywords and keyword phrases used in popular Web searches.”

I agree, the more targeted, the better. For less-competitive keywords, the use of a short and targeted title tag can make a huge difference.

Then, about H1 tags often ignored by webmasters who think that they are “too big”:

“Some Web developers believe H1 tags are unsightly on the page — large, bold text that distracts from the overall site design. This needn’t be the case. The H1 tag’s font, size, color, and surrounding white space can all be defined using style sheets to complete the site design.”

With CSS, it’s indeed very easy to resize your H1 if you think it looks too big. Personally, I always resize them with a size of about 20px. You shouldn’t bypass the use of H1 just because you think it’s tedious to use CSS.

Next, you must ensure each optimized page’s body copy is adequately long and keyword rich. If at all possible, incorporate at least 250 to 300 words on each page so the search engines have enough content to determine the page’s theme.

Include relevant keywords, particularly near the top of the page, as search engines weigh these words more heavily. Optimal keyword density is a highly debated topic. Generally speaking, 5 to 8 percent keyword density in body copy is ideal. But be careful not to go overboard, or your copy won’t read well. Body copy must be useful to visitors if it’s to be relevant to search engines.”

The reason why you should include your keywords on the top is that search engines give more importance to them but also from the users’ point of view, you want them to read relevant content as soon as they land your page and don’t want them to scroll down your page to know what your site is about.

“It’s also important hypertext links pointing to various site pages include your targeted keywords and keyword phrases as assigned to specific Web pages. Most major search engines still weigh link anchor text as highly relevant to the page being linked to. It’s best to keep text links relatively succinct; the longer the link text, the more diluted the theme.”

Try to link to your most important pages from the home page using relevant and short anchor texts, and try to use the same anchor text as link titles on these pages.