Proper Site Architecture For SEO

When building a website, you need to take into account how easy it will be for a search engine robot to read through your site properly. In most parts, you simply have to follow the most basic best practices of web design to avoid having pages on your site, or worse yet, your entire site not be indexed. Remember, establishing your site for ease of use with search engine robots does not mean making it more difficult for your readers, it means making it better for them.

Proper site architecture with SEO in mind is not something that provides fast, short term results. Sites built in this fashion will take full advantage of the long term benefits that search engines award for consistency and easy of navigation.

The most difficult part of building a site in this fashion is the fact that you have to let go of the bells and whistles. Search engine robots are about as advanced crawling wise as the original Internet Explorer. Basically, if your site involves frames, Flash, or scripting, the robot will overlook it. The robot will, however pick up on the text within your site, the links on your site, the meta-data in your HTML code, and your sites body text.

The concept of avoiding Flash and other methods of prettying up your site may seem like they would reduce the appeal for your visitors, but by using straight HTML and CSS, you can pull off plenty of excellent site design functions that provide easier navigation, faster load times, and a better site for search engine robots to crawl. The more text on the page, the more relevant your page becomes to the keywords it has within it, thus making it infinitely more useful then a site that looks great but doesn’t cover half the information.

In regards to navigation, properly configuring an XML Sitemap will greatly increase how easily and fast your website is crawled. This creates an overall blueprint of your website for a search engine robot to take advantage of as long as you configure it properly. If you have to use dynamic content on your pages, make sure to set the priority and frequency of those pages to high so the bot will crawl them most often, but a much better overall solution would be to simply make all of your pages static to provide the best results. Either way, keeping all of your pages no more than two clicks away from your main page is also a great practice to follow, as it makes it easier and more likely that the bottom will automatically hit those links as it scans through it.

The methods discussed here are not necessarily the only ways to properly configure your site architecture for best practice SEO. You can still use many of the fancier methods that were suggested to avoid, but they require you to build them in a way that keeps the excess code out of the way of the search engine robot to prevent forcing it to read through something it will gain no value from and not understand.

Share This