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How to Optimize Your website Structure 100% for SEO ?
Here are ten reasons why website design architecture is critical for SEO success
How To Optimize Website Architecture For SEO
- Here are ten reasons why website design architecture is critical for SEO success
- SEO is an ongoing effort
- Search engines love text.
- Flat vs. Deep Website Design Hierarchies(Architectures)
- Flat website Design hierarchy
- Best to build a flat site hierarchy
- Deep Website Design Hierarchy
- There are exceptions to every rule.
The Importance Of Website Architecture For SEO
SEO is an ongoing effort
Truthfully, SEO is an ongoing effort.
There isn't one specific tactic you can implement at the start to succeed in the race.
It will require many factors to be evaluated, tweaked, and then refined.
With that said, there's still a handful of variables that are absolutely essential to your success.
I'm going to focus on these key areas for now to give you a solid foundation for your continued effort.
So, first off, search engines are built around their ability to index pages, so it's very important that your site is accessible to crawlers, and that crawlers can get to every page on your site.
Search engines love text.
It's the easiest for them to parse.
If you're using images in place of text, you, too, will have a problem.
Search engines also love clicking links. If you've got your links tucked into a custom JavaScript navigation, your crawl ability might be impaired, so as you look at your site, make sure you have at least one regular, text-based hyperlink to every page on your site.
Flat vs. Deep Website Design Hierarchies(Architectures)
Flat website Design hierarchy
Best to build a flat site hierarchy
It's usually best to build a flat site hierarchy versus a deep site hierarchy and to help understand this, let's look at a flat hierarchy.
Here, you can see our homepage at the top and then the links that we have on our homepage are represented by the second line of web pages.
Here, these pages might be things like About Us, Services, Locations, and Contact.
If we have, for example, multiple locations we would place those under the locations page and create a unique page for each one.
Site architecture sends link authority around your website.
Deep Website Design Hierarchy
A deep website design structure looks more like this. As you can see, some content
is buried deep within the site.
This means a user has to click more times to arrive at the content.
This also means Google has to travel further through your site map to index the content, and the further Google goes, the less value it's applying to each page, right?
It simply sees them as less important.
One other thing that is important to pay attention to is siloed content.
In this sitemap, you'll see here we have a page and its subpages off to the side.
There's no direct link from the homepage, or any page for that matter, to this content.
This suggests to Google if it can't even find it, that it's not really important to you.
There are exceptions to every rule.
In some situations, there are simply too many categories to show them all at one level.
In other cases, showing specific topics too soon will just confuse your audience, and users will understand your offerings much better if you include some intermediary category pages to establish context.
Focus on building a site that's easy to navigate for users.
With your most important content linked clearly and prominently.
Next, be sure to look at how your URLs are named. It's a great idea to have natural language URLs
free of any extensions.
If you have an E-Commerce site, the URL of afrohoard.com/product/jack-harlow-afro-print-shirt-clothing
is going to be much better than afrohoard.com /productid=123.
Along with that same concept, be sure your title tags are unique to each individual page and include a clear topic.
Don't start your title tags with your domain name. Simply append that to the end.
Be sure each page has a unique meta description.
Google often uses the meta description as the short text visible in search results.
Don't just list keywords here.
Create a meaningful sentence or two that will entice the visitor to click.
Next, make sure you're taking advantage of heading tags.
These are the Heading One (H1), Heading Two (H2), and Heading Three (H3) tags.
You always want your heading tags to appear in order on your page, and you should only have one Heading-one tag.
Avoid your heading one tag to say things like about us or contact us.
Instead, focus on the core topic for that page.
Check that every image on your website has a well-defined name and an alt-tag description.
No need to keyword stuff in your tags, just make them natural and relevant to the user, and Google will reward you.
Finally, be sure to use a sitemap both in HTML and XML format along with a well-defined robots.txt file.
I also recommend signing up for Google Webmaster Tools.
It's a great dashboard that will help you inspect the overall SEO health of your site.
You'll find the free signup at Google.com/Webmasters.
Use the dashboard to review how many pages have been crawled and indexed, see a list of crawlers, and identify any HTML improvements Google recommends for you.
If you have a moderately sized site, check out the tool Screaming Frog SEO Spider at screamingfrog.co.uk.
You can crawl your site just a search engine would see a list of any broken links along with an output of all your heading tags, meta descriptions, and title tags.
Work through each page on your site to make sure it's technically sound.
