Is Your Website Architecture Hurting Your SEO?

By Dino Adamou

The one aspect of SEO that you have complete control over is your website architecture. You control how your site is built, how the pages relate to each other, and how your page hierarchy flows. These aspects are just as important to getting decent page placement results as having a ton of back links. We will look at a few of the most important website architecture elements that have a critical impact on SEO.

Title Tags

While the title of your web page that the reader sees might be “Designer Shoes Enhance any Outfit” the title that the search engines sees can be something entirely different, and you control what that title is. Every web page should have a title tag in the header, and what you put in there is completely up to you. This tag is where you should make sure that the primary keywords for your site are prevalent. For instance “cheap designer shoes – woman's fashion shoes” would be perfectly acceptable for a title tag for this page.

Internal Keyword Anchoring

Just as you want other sites to link to yours using anchor text that contains the proper keywords, you want to ensure that your pages link to other pages within your own site using the same strategy. For instance if your website is about telescopes, then every article you publish on that site should have 2-3 hyperlinks that use relevant keywords and target pages within your own site.

Let’s say that your front page article uses the phrase “beginner telescope”. You would use that phrase as the anchor text for a hyperlink within your own site that describes a good telescope for beginners. While internal links do not hold as much weight as links from other sites, they are still important and help reinforce to the search engines exactly what you your site is about.

The Three Click Rule

Ideally, from the front page of your site, every other page on your site should be accessible in three clicks or less. The easiest way to accomplish this is through correct categorization and sub-categorization of your content. By dividing up sites with a lot of content into categories and sub-categories, it makes it easy for both your readers and search engine robots to navigate your site.

Images

Images may or may not be worth a thousand words, but for SEO purposes they are worth at least a few dozen. By having images on your site with keyword optimized “alt” text, you are giving search engines another trail of crumbs that leads back to your site. In addition, images make pages more interesting for your readers and help reduce the clutter that many long content pages are plagued with.

Content is King

When all is said and done, the value that your site gives to your readers is the most important part of SEO that there is. Readers who find your site informative and engaging will return to your site often to check for updates AND they are more likely to share your site with their friends. As time goes on, the little “tricks” that the SEO “experts” use to leapfrog over top of sites with real information lose their effectiveness and sites with useful, regularly updated content take their rightful place at the top.

What website infrastructure rules are you following to ensure proper SEO? Have we missed any, or do you disagree with the ones we have highlighted? Let us know!