Bolt-on Site Features Can Boost SEO

Features are cool, whether you're talking about the heated leather seats in a new BMW or the latest e-commerce site features. Fancy bells and whistles are a symbol that you mean business, that your site is a leader in the space and that you care about making your customers' onsite experience pleasant and productive.

Think of bolt-on site features as being like power tools. For example, a chainsaw can be powerful and effective when wielded carefully to solve the right problem. If that same chainsaw isn't properly controlled, it can lop off an appendage.

The same is true for SEO and bolt-on site features, which tend to fall into at least one of the following traps.

• Value for page volume: When a new feature will increase the number and types of pages created, make sure that those pages will have valuable keyword targets for SEO.

• Value for word volume: Plan for add-on features to increase the occurrence of valuable keywords, not just the number words. Increasing the number of words without increasing valuable keywords diffuses the overall keyword theme of a page.

• Crawlability: If a site feature can't be crawled without the use of cookies, JavaScript, CSS or iframes, it's possible that the typical search engine spider will not be able to crawl it. In essence, the content implemented using these technologies doesn't exist for search engines, so if you want the feature to improve your site's SEO, it needs to be crawlable.

Here's a look at five site features and their pros and cautions when it comes to SEO.

Continue on Page 2