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Semantic Cluster: the page template
A page on a website is generally a sequence of HTML code lines that can be interpreted by web browsers, whether desktop or mobile. One could always argue that this will not always be the case, that devices such as connected speakers like Google Home consume content somewhat differently, but let’s start from this assumption, by far the most common.
The page template is what « builds » this HTML code. It is, for example, what your famous theme WordPress / Prestashop / Magento / etc. will offer, or even that of your custom-built website, depending on how it was designed by its developers. And it must be said that most of the time, SEO best practices are violated by developers, for all sorts of good or bad reasons.
Over time, we have drifted away from the basic principles of the internet, which were: pages offering useful content, linked to each other, stored in directories. Simple, effective, easy to understand. All of that is long gone now: today’s websites are riddled with mega-menus, bloated footers, sidebars, faceted navigation, links in every direction. It’s a mess, it’s heavy, it’s slow — but that’s not the most important issue.
The most important thing is that Google doesn’t like it. Full stop.
Yet your website has every reason to please Google: like every site in the world, its crawl quota is limited (see this reference article). This refers essentially to the time Google’s bots will spend on your site. The less optimised the site, the less time they will choose to spend.
You need to index as many pages as possible, and the right ones. But that is another story.
You have decided to implement a semantic cluster on your site to outrank your competitors. Very good. But your great content still needs to be correctly served to search engines, doesn’t it?
Why a page template
Semantic cluster pages have a dual objective:
- Boost the commercial pages of the site, in order to push them up in search engines.
- Rank themselves, particularly on the long tail.
To achieve this, they must meet specific criteria:
- Be as easily as possible crawlable and indexable by Google and its bots.
- Offer original, interesting content that answers users’ search intent.
I’ll skip over internal linking, content structure, semantic drift, etc., as all of this is encompassed within the body of the page and its content (the <body><main> section in HTML).
This assumes that cluster pages are:
- Lightweight, fast to load.
- Made up primarily of content, not weighed down by heavy, superfluous code.
- Perfectly structured, linked to each other through links you control.
The question you might ask is: if I use the template provided by my site theme’s developers, will I get a good result?
Check for yourself:
- Open a content page on your site (not the homepage — the « Legal Notice » page, for example, since it’s mandatory) in your desktop browser and view its source code (CTRL + U on PC).
- How many lines of code do you get? 2,000, 5,000 …. 10,000?
- How many lines does your content take up? 10, 50, 150?
How do you expect things to go well with such a ratio between the page content and all the rest, which is nearly useless, or even highly polluting at the semantic level?
The solution is clear: you need to go back to the basics of the web: content within simple, clean code, optimised for search engines.
Is your e-commerce or brochure site, or your blog, poorly built? Either you have the means to have it rebuilt entirely (good luck with that), or you let the semantic cluster do its job instead: it will be optimised and can push forward the commercial pages of the rest of the site — which, after all, are no worse off than those of the competition.
It’s the cluster that makes the difference in Google’s eyes.
What makes a good page template?
It’s a template that keeps the visual identity of your site, but for which you will need to make choices:
1. Clean it up as much as possible, to put the spotlight on content by stripping out everything else: menus, footers, links of all kinds.
OR
2. Keep all these disruptive elements for the cluster and accept the consequences for its effectiveness.
OR
3. Keep them for visitors while hiding them from search engine bots.
1. A fully cleaned-up template
Things are straightforward with this first option: you remove everything that can be removed — menus, footers, even the link back to the site’s homepage can be removed (provided the page features a Call To Action to capture an email address, for example, which we’ll discuss further down this page).
The result is an ultra-lightweight page, with no link or content noise whatsoever: the ideal for a cluster page, though less so for your visitor, who becomes trapped on it.
Here are some real-world examples of GtMetrix scores achieved with this method:
- For a jewellery and watches site. Before: 87% (already a great score) – After: 99% (not bad at all).
- For a photography site: 90% – 92%. We were starting from a high base, but still an improvement.
- For a competition site: 77% – 93%. Now that’s significant.
Of course, one could argue that GtMetrix isn’t THE reference — you can run the same tests with WebPageTest and similar tools, and the results are equally convincing (a load time dropping from 2.76s to 0.87s for the competition site, for example — a gain of 2 seconds!).
Convincing, but a little radical.
2. A template matching the rest of the site
There’s little to say here: you change nothing, and cluster pages, their content and links will be buried in the rest of the code. That is bad.
3. A cleaned-up template… but only for search engine bots
You want to keep some or all of the elements that disrupt the cluster but are useful to your visitors?
There is a solution: internal link cloaking. I’ll let the experts jump out of their seats — « dishonest » cloaking is forbidden by Google. This article explains the technique and the nuances involved.
In short:
- Cloaking is an advanced practice that involves presenting a page differently to search engine bots and to human users.
- Cloaking can be used dishonestly, and sites that do it that way can be detected and penalised.
- Like any tool (the same applies to a hammer), cloaking can of course be used honestly and effectively — and that is exactly what we are proposing to do here. So, no risk of penalty.
In fact, honest internal link cloaking is used by thousands of sites, which are of course not penalised (even if you can find exceptions, as with everything in life). This is the case for forums and e-commerce sites, for example Fnac and Cdiscount among the most well-known.
To close the debate: dishonest cloaking involves modifying the content of a site between what visitors and bots see. What we are proposing here is cloaking of internal links on our pages, which is an entirely different matter.
Getting back to what link cloaking allows:
- Keep the links you value: all or part of the menu, all or part of the footer, etc.
- Display them to visitors, while not providing them to search engine bots. The site is therefore optimised for them, just like option 1 — you get the best of both worlds.
Implementing internal link cloaking only takes a few minutes, particularly with solutions like the one from Patrick Valibus — see his site: In Cloacking Veritas. The vast majority of my cluster clients have implemented it and are very happy with it.
Semantic clusters, conversion, and templates
Semantic clusters work — and in two ways: they push the commercial pages of your site up in rankings, and they bring in visitors.
Since they do, you might as well try to sell your products and services to those visitors… but not so fast.
Selling directly is not always a good idea. We need to discuss together whether or not it makes sense to add Call To Actions (buttons designed to capture an email address or trigger a purchase) to cluster pages, and if so, what their purpose and design should be.
I follow what other professionals in the sector are saying, and the trend that emerges is this:
- Selling directly is often clumsy and out of place within a semantic cluster. When you go to Wikipedia, are you in the mindset to buy something? No. The objective of a cluster page is to inform, reassure, and answer a query that is rarely commercial in nature. Let the commercial pages do the selling, and let the cluster pages give something. Give in order to receive, later.
- That said, it is perfectly valid to distinguish between purely informational cluster pages and others that are more commercial in nature.
- In conclusion, you can offer different types of Call To Action depending on the page type:
- For purely informational pages, offering a free bonus (an e-book, a comparison guide, a video) in exchange for an email address seems wise. You can then follow up with those people for commercial purposes or not, depending on your strategy.
- For pages with a more commercial slant, promoting a key offer or product can be appropriate — but use it sparingly, and make it an offer that’s hard to refuse.
In all cases, we will need to discuss this together before implementation — my experience as an e-commerce operator since 2009 can contribute to a well-informed decision.
Neuro-ergonomic page templates
Since a semantic cluster brings visitors, you might as well make them feel at home immediately: that is the goal of Neuroergonomics.
I present the principles in this article. 80% of my clients have benefited from it, and here too, they are very satisfied.
With Neuroergonomics, you put all the chances on your side to ensure visitors don’t leave the page quickly, and that they click on the Call To Action when applicable — improving your conversion rate, your Google ranking (since bounce rate is taken into account), and the profitability of your cluster.
In practice, it’s very straightforward:
- You provide a template as you imagine it working best for your pages.
- The Neuroscience expert audits the page within a week. They provide a video and a PDF presenting the 19 audit points, their findings, and recommendations.
- You implement the recommendations and resubmit the template, which will be reviewed for use in the cluster.
Final recommendations and actions to take
Pages on a website are expected to have a name and an extension: .html, .php… I do not recommend ending a page name with a slash: a slash indicates a directory, not a page. Once again, SEO work is partly about making Google’s job easier — so let’s at least tell it that a page is… a page, not a directory.
Since we are going to work on the page template:
- It makes sense to ensure that the most useful HTTP headers are present, which is sometimes not the case. The two I recommend: expires and cache-control. To be discussed together.
- In the source code: use absolute URLs rather than relative ones, again for reasons of accessibility optimisation for Google.
Finally, though this goes beyond the scope of page templates: implement server log analysis, so that you can truly understand what is happening between your site and search engine bots, and then take appropriate action. This too is part of what allows you to outrank your competitors.
Summary
Let’s briefly recap:
- The cluster page template gives your cluster pages an appropriate, optimised framework.
- You need to decide on the type of template to implement: remove everything that gets in the way, OR change nothing, OR implement internal link cloaking.
- We need to discuss the Call To Actions to use, depending on the type of pages.
- You need to deliver the template so it can be optimised via a Neuroergonomics audit (as an option), or integrated directly.
- It is recommended to take into account a few technical recommendations for the template code (see the previous section).
Ultimately, it’s simple and can be done in an average of 2 weeks. Over to (both of) us.
Need a semantic cluster built with the right page templates? Discover our semantic cluster SEO service and our GEO LLM strategy to maximise your content’s visibility.
Questions fréquentes
What makes a good page template?
It’s a template that keeps the visual identity of your site, but for which you will need to make choices: 1.
What is option 2: A template matching the rest of the site?
There’s little to say: you change nothing, and cluster pages, their content and links will be buried in the rest of the code. That is bad.
What is option 3: A cleaned-up template… but only for search engine bots?
You want to keep some or all of the elements that disrupt the cluster but are useful to your visitors? There is a solution: internal link cloaking.
What is the section on semantic clusters, conversion, and templates?
Semantic clusters work — and in two ways: they push the commercial pages of your site up in rankings, and they bring in visitors. Selling directly is not always a good idea.
What are neuro-ergonomic page templates?
Since a semantic cluster brings visitors, you might as well make them feel at home immediately: that is the goal of Neuroergonomics. I present the principles in this article.
What are the final recommendations and actions to take?
Pages on a website are expected to have a name and an extension: .html, .php… I do not recommend ending a page name with a slash: a slash indicates a directory, not a page.