Having a website is never an end in itself: that website has to be found by search engines and the robots and spiders of Google and others that crawl all over the web cataloguing it so that hapless searchers can find you.
Read on:
Off-page versus on-page SEO
SEO jargon buster
Tips to improve your Google ranking
And while much attention is placed on SEO – things like finding the right keywords and meta tags – one of the key things every one forgets is that the actual structure of your website can have a huge impact on how the robots find your content and how well you perform in the rankings that ultimately lead to bringing people to your site.
So what can be done about it? Well here are some basic tips for making your website structure work well for SEO and the spiders.
1) Site construction tech
The first consideration is how your site is constructed – first and foremost what technology you use to construct it. Spiders and search engines like to crawl all over a site looking for keywords and you have to help them do this. So use CSS and XHTML languages – using tools such as WordPress and others – to create and curate your site.
Don’t use flash and JavaScript if you can help it as spiders don’t like this so much.
2) Site construction itself
The next element to consider is the ‘depth’ of your site – that is the number of clicks from the home page down to any given page. A shallow website is best, as this is quicker and easier for search engines and spiders to work through. A shallow site would be anything that took three or fewer clicks to get from the home page to the page in question.
Now designing such a ‘flat’ site isn’t always easy, especially as your site grows and develops. If you have 300 pages, then you are looking at having to have 100 categories on your home page to launch from, which clearly isn’t practical. So you have to look at internal linking…
3) Internal Linking
Internal links – or internal backlinks to give them their full name – consist of connections between individual pages within your website. Creating internal links between the pages on your website offers a number of different SEO advantages.
Internal links decrease the number of clicks required to access each page on your website, allowing the search engines to use their crawl budgets more effectively. They also offer opportunities to use keyword-rich anchor texts throughout your pages (though you should be careful to only create internal links to relevant, useful pages, instead of using this as an opportunity to create keyword-stuffed links).
Internal links also improve the user experience on your website by providing readers with additional materials that may pique their interests. As a result, both average time on site and average pages per visit go up, leading to potential SEO and conversion rate benefits.
Whenever you add a new page, article, or blog post to your website, take a second to see if the readers who are accessing this new content might be interested in other topics you’ve covered elsewhere on your site.
4) Get the URL structure right
One final website structure element to consider is how your individual page URLs are built. As you might expect, there’s a potential SEO benefit to be had from integrating your company’s target keywords into this vital navigation area.
The specific steps you’ll need to take to set up an SEO-friendly URL structure depend on whether your site runs on HTML or a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Magento.
• For HTML websites
If you run an HTML-oriented website, your page URLs will be built according to the file names of every new HTML file you create and upload to your site.
For example, if you use a desktop website editing program like Dreamweaver to create a new article and save your file as “my-new-article.html,” the full URL of your article once uploaded to the root domain of your website will be http://www.mydomain.com/my-new-article.html.
Now, in this example, odds are you aren’t trying to get your website ranked for the keyword phrase “my new article.” So, instead of using generic file names, take the time to label each file with a descriptive name that includes your target keyword.
Be sure to separate multiple words with dashes, rather than underscores, as the search engine spiders may interpret words separated by underscores as a single word (as in, the file name “apple_pie” might be read as “applepie” to the search engines in some cases).
• For CMS websites
Typically, most CMS websites make it easy to create search-optimized page URLs, though you may need to tweak a few settings to get the greatest SEO benefit possible.
For example, in the case of WordPress, you’ll need to first navigate to the “Permalinks” section of the “Settings” area within your dashboard and select a link structure option that includes your post title within the full URL assigned to each post. If you don’t take this action, your URLs will—by default—include the numbers and codes created for each new post by WordPress’s standard settings.
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