The Anatomy of Page that Ranks

If you asked a doctor to tell you how your body works, they’d likely need to start with a certain organ and then explain how that organ relates to other organs.

INTERESTING FACT: For an adult human, taking just one step uses up to 200 muscles – our bodies are complex!

There’s a lot you could talk about when it comes to how our bodies work.

However, it’s likely that when someone asks such a broad, in-depth question (of which thousands of books have been written about) that they may be more interested in a certain sub-topic, like how the brain, heart, or lungs work.

The anatomy of a web page that ranks and brings in valuable traffic isn’t all that different than how our bodies work (for the sake of this anatomy analogy).

Let’s use the topic of “mindfulness” as an example:

• 110,000 searches per month in the US for just that single keyword
• Mindful.org has the number 1 and 2 positions in Google
• The number one result is “Getting Started with Mindfulness“

Taking a look at the anatomy of that page, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s number one.

• The entire site is about mindfulness and the domain is even mindful.org – meaning the entire site is likely “on-topic”
• Google is looking at that single keyword, “mindfulness” and asking, “what does this person want?” Recommending a “Getting Started” resource makes sense because the searcher hasn’t made it clear what they are looking for. The topic of mindfulness is large, so “what is they want to know about it?“

Looking at the page, we see all kinds of different “organs,” or sub-topics working together to make up a body of a functional resource on a large topic:

• How-to-guides
• Videos
• Audio guided meditations
• Many links to additional resources on mindfulness

So what does this analogy and example have to do with you?

If you want to become the number 1 result on your topic(s), you need to consider the entire body of your topic.

Provide the most thorough and well-organized resources and think of each page on your site as a body.

What you include on each page are organs. If you’re missing helpful information, you’ve got a body without an organ.

And a body without an organ doesn’t function well.