Blog Entry

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques – Distance from Index (DFI)

This is part of a continuing series of short blogs on different organic search ranking techniques we use to increase our clients’ website visibility. Hopefully it would help you with optimizing your website. As always, if you have questions or would like us to assist you with improving and maintaining your organic search rankings, contact us!

Article originally published from SEO-Search-Marketing.com.


Search engine optimization (SEO) comes in many forms and techniques.  Today, we are going to introduce to you a term that we often use, called DFI (Distance From Index). Basically, when referring to a URL, it looks like how far the page is (distance) from the root home page (index). As an example, this is the root:

http://evo.evoclients.com

This is a subpage from the root, with an index of 1

http://evo.evoclients.com/chicago-marketing/

This is another page on our website, with an index of 2

http://evo.evoclients.com/case-studies/carbon-tradeex/

Why do you need to know this? Well, there are several tests being performed that demonstrated that the distance from the index impacts your search engine ranking. One of which has been reported by SEOBlog. You can read the article here.

The general takeaway of the article on SEO is that it is important that you should avoid having a DFI of longer than 5. Once it is longer than 5, your chances of ranking on Google goes down.  So keep your DFI small. This may be a little more difficult to achieve if your website is big and has thousands of pages. In that case, content management becomes important and getting a DFI less than 5 would be quite difficult. Fortunately, most of our clients (and yours, we suspect) have less than 1000 pages on their website, so this issue is usually non-existent when we are doing a project on search optimization or search marketing.

Try it out and let us know your results. If this article helps you in any way for your search ranking and SEO optimization, drop us a note and let us know. We would be interested in know whether this tip works for you in anyway, and how you go around implementing it.