Many SEO firms, to this day, believe that SEO is about content and links. While the importance of content and links cannot be undermined, a site’s architecture is equally important in achieving SEO compliance. There are many aspects that make for search friendly site architecture. With search engine algorithms becoming increasingly complex, it is no longer enough to achieve basic SEO compliance. For a website to be truly SEO compliant, it is becoming increasingly important to address every aspect of website architecture, content and linking. Here is a checklist of things that you need to address to achieve SEO compliant website design and architecture.

SEO Compliant Website Architecture Components

Each of the items listed below have an impact on the site’s architecture and design, either directly or indirectly. No SEO checklist can be complete without addressing all the aspects of SEO compliant website architecture listed below. Each of these aspects has a different level of impact on search results, but collectively can significantly make a difference to your site’s SEO compliance. Understanding their importance will help you ensure that you have an SEO compliant website structure, design, navigation and architecture.

• Spam Database: Make sure your site is not part of a spam database.
• Domain Renewal and Age: If your site is new, book it for 5-10 years. Even if your site has been around for a while, show serious intent by renewing the domain for 5-10 years. 
• Redirects: Avoid using meta refreshes or 302 redirects as far as possible. If a page in your site has moved, use a 301 redirect.
• Custom 404 Error Page: Use a custom 404 error page that has your site’s look and feel with links to all the important sections in your site.
• Robots.txt: Use the robots.txt file to block sections that you want to prevent search engines from crawling. Use it also to point search engines to your sitemap.
• HTML & XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps help visitors navigate your site. They also provide a list of URLs in your site to search engines and help them crawl the site better.
• Navigation: Do not rely exclusively on image-based navigation, image maps, forms or site-search based navigation. Also, avoid using AJAX, Javascripts or Flash as your exclusive means of navigation on the site. Text links are important and should be an integral part of your site’s design and architecture. Provide text links within the page content or provide for alternative text based navigation.
• Search Friendly URL Construct: The way your URLs are constructed can play a role in how your site ranks. Not using dynamic parameters, using keywords in the URLs and making sure the keywords are as close to the start of the URL as possible can all impact your performance in search.
• Cookies: Most sites use them. But do not make the download of a cookie a pre-requisite for browsing your site. Search engines cannot download cookies so they will not be able to access your site.
• Multiple Domain and duplicate content Issues: If you own multiple domains, do not host the same content on all the sites. Do not use plagiarized content from the web, do not have multiple copies of the same content on your site. Duplicate content can adversely impact your site’s performance.
• Title and Description Tags: Title and description tags are meant to summarize a page’s content for the search engine. Not using keywords in the title and description, not having titles and descriptions and/or having duplicate titles and descriptions can confuse search engines and prevent your site from ranking well.
• Page Load Time Factors: The faster your site loads, the better. Visitors to your site will love that they get access to information quickly. Search engines will be able to crawl and index more pages every time they visit your site. In turn, this will improve your site’s performance in search results.
• Broken Links & Error URLs: Every broken link is a dead end…to the visitors to your site and to search engines. Broken links also slow down the rate at which search engines crawl your site content. An error free site would mean a site that’s crawled well and a site that performs well in search results.
• Frames: Frame is a dated technology that can potentially block search engines from crawling and indexing pages from your site.
• Flash, JavaScript and AJAX: By default, search engines cannot index the contents of Flash, JavaScripts or AJAX. Use SWFObject if you are using flash and use noscript content to make sure some alternate text is presented to search engines when you use scripts.
• Externalizing JavaScripts and Styles: Instead of embedding styles and Javascripts on the page, save them as external files and call them from the page. This will reduce page weight and help pages in your site load faster.
• No Follow, No Index Attributes: Nofollow prevents search engines from following links and noindex prevents search engines from indexing pages in your sites. Use these attributes judiciously.
• W3C Compliance: Getting your site W3C compliant ensures that it is compatible across browsers and also that your site code is search engine compliant.

Good website architecture factors in all the above parameters and more. Make sure your site is SEO compliant in its design, structure and architecture. This will help the site rank much better in search results.

Presenting Website Calibrator

Website Calibrator is a diagnostic solution from Position2. Besides doing an in-depth competitive SEO analysis, it does a detailed audit of your website architecture across over 39 parameters of website design and architecture, and recommends specific solutions that ensure an SEO compliant website structure. To know more about Website Calibrator and other SEO solutions from Position2, write to us today. Get an audit of your site architecture, achieve SEO compliance and make your website perform better in search results.

Contributed by Tushar Prabhu

• Tag Clouds and #SEO (0)
• Anchor Text and its Search Engine Optimization Importance (1)
• SEO Competitive Analysis (7)

In order to execute a successful SEO strategy, it is very important to know who your competitors are. Understanding your competitors’ SEO strategy, website and their level of penetration in the internet is critical to the success of SEO campaigns. What I am referring to is not just direct competitors, but competitors that rank in search engines for the keywords that you optimize your website.

Executing an SEO competitive analysis

Competitive SEO analysis can reveal many interesting findings about your competitors’ SEO. After you have shortlisted the keywords and the competitors that rank for those keywords, run your competitors’ websites through this checklist:

Content Analysis:

Analyzing your competitors’ content will help you set a benchmark on how much you need to optimize your website.

Title and Description Tags: Compare your title and description tags with your competitors’ to assess the number of times the keyword appears, placement of keyword and identify if you can make your tags look more appealing than your competitors can.

Heading Tags: Compare your competitors’ websites to identify if your targeted keywords are used. Analyze the overall density of the keyword present in heading tags. Normally, a top-ranking website will always have the targeted keyword present in the H1, H2 … H6 tags.

Body Text: Analyze the overall keyword density, placement of your targeted term in your competitors’ website to assess how well the content is optimized. Identify if the content is contextually relevant to the keyword being targeted on the page.

Alternate Text: Analyze if the images used on your competitors’ website contain the targeted term.

Domain Names and URLs: Most of the websites that contain keywords in their domains would already have scored a brownie point; they would be ranking for those competitive keywords. If the keyword you are targeting is not present in your domain name, ensure that it is at least present in your URLs.

Strong and Bold Tags: Most of the competing websites would enclose important keywords within strong or bold tags. This highlights the important terms to search engines.

Bulleted Lists: Analyze if your competitors have the targeted keyword present in their bulleted list.

Website Architecture

Your website may have been optimized perfectly for targeted keywords, but if you are still not ranking for your targeted keywords in SERPs. Then it may be because you have bad website architecture

URL Structure: Ensure your websites URL structure is free of any dynamic strings and parameters. This may help you score high rankings in search engines.

Domain Age: If your competitors’ domain age is older than yours is, ensure that you register your domain for at least 10 years. This will help search engines consider that you seriously want to establish your presence on the internet.

No-follow Tags: Check if your competitors have used no-follow tags to channel page rank juice throughout the website. Implementing a thematic website structure can do wonders for your website rankings.

XML and HTML Sitemaps: Competitor websites that perform well in SERPs always have a HTML sitemap as their internal navigation. Ensure that you create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines; this will ensure that all the inner pages are crawled, too.

Internal Navigation: This is one of the most important factors that decide how well your website performs in SERPs against your competitors. Ensure that your innermost pages are accessible within the first three clicks when a user lands on a page. Your internal navigation could be in the form of top global navigation, footer links, breadcrumbs, category based navigation, news tags, cloud tags, etc.

Flash, Ajax, Frames, JavaScript’s: Your competitors may take your place in SERPs if your content is not visible to search engines. Ensure that critical content that you expect to be crawled is parsed by search engines. Do not make your content as a part of Flash, Ajax, Frames or JavaScript’s. If you do, ensure that you present an alternate version of the same content in textual format to search engines.

Internal Linking and External Linking

Internal Linking: Assess your competitors’ internal linking for the keyword you want to optimize and you will notice in most cases that the keyword is present in the internal links of the competitors’ site. Assess how many such anchor texts are pointing to the ranking URL and the page rank of the pages that have the anchor text for that keyword in your competitors’ site. This will help you understand how many internal anchor texts you need for your website.

External Linking: Most of the external links present in your website must be relevant to the content that is being optimized. Most of your top-ranking competitors would have implemented a no-follow tag on most of their external links. Ensure that external links present on your website has a no-follow tag. This will ensure that you prevent the flow of valuable page rank juice to external sites.

Backlinks: Analyze your competitors’ backlinks for relevance and anchor text. Identify the number of websites that contain the targeted keyword as anchor text and measure the page rank of those linking pages. This will help you understand how much time you need to spend in your back linking efforts.

Once the analysis is complete, ensure that you use this data to compare your website against your competitors’. This tell you how much you need to optimize your website to win your way through SERPs.

Contributed by Zuheb SM

• Website Architecture & SEO: The dark side of the moon (2)
• Picking a search-friendly domain name (3)
• Tips for SEO-friendly website architecture – Part 1 (5)

People spend a lot of time creating tons of content, making flashy designs and graphics but little do they realize that their website architecture may play a big role in increasing traffic to their website. We have noticed many keyword-optimized websites, over the years, have performed poorly in search engines, mainly due to the fact that their website architecture was not up to the mark. From mom and pop websites to enterprise-level websites, every website needs to have good website architecture not only to ensure that the search engine spiders crawl the website effectively, but also to provide a good user experience by improving navigation and accessibility.

I’d like to share a few tips on how to make your website more user-friendly and accessible to both search engines and users by making some important changes in your website architecture.

You can have a good architectural foundation for your website by implementing corrective measures across these 5 broad areas:
•    Linking and navigational architecture
•    Content architecture
•    URL architecture
•    Server accessibility, hosting and IP architecture
•    Technical architecture

Linking and Navigational architecture:

Tip 1: Organize the information on your website into different themes or categories. As you divide the information into broad categories, place top-level links of these categories on the homepage. These categories could then be subdivided and routed to subfolders. The internal link structure of the website should enable the user to reach any page within four clicks. This will also make it easy for search engines to crawl your pages effectively without having to crawl deeply.

Linking and Navigational architecture

Tip 2: Ensure that most of your important pages are linked from the homepage.

Tip 3: In large websites, we often come across pages/sections that have no Page Rank. This is because search engines have a limit when it comes to crawling content and it could also be due to the fact that the pages are too deep within the website. Linking pages that have no Page Rank to pages that have a high Page Rank will not only ensure that your pages will be crawled and indexed, but will also get some Page Rank juice from the parent page.
Tip 4: Implementing an HTML sitemap could easily ensure that users find a way to navigate through the website easily. The sitemap should be linked from the homepage. Include keywords in these links that point from your HTML sitemaps.
Tip 5: Ensure that none of your links are embedded within JavaScript’s, Ajax, Flash or Images. Test your website using the Lynx browser to analyze if it’s being accessed by search engine crawlers.

Content architecture:

Tip 1: If you are planning to develop your website using the technologies mentioned below, you should also be aware that these could be deterrent, if you want your website to be accessible to crawlers.
-   Frames
-   Flash
-   AJAX

Ensure that an alternate version of content is used if you’re using these platforms. The content in the alternate version should be exactly similar to the content being displayed within frames, flash or AJAX; otherwise you might be flagged by search engines for cloaking.
Tip 2: If you have video or audio files on your website, ensure that these files have appropriate filenames, titles and descriptions.
Tip 3: Ensure that none of your critical, indexable content remains behind a form
Tip 4: Clean your website of canonical/duplicated URLs, as search engines treat them as duplicated pages. You can redirect the duplicated copy of the page to the original using a 301 redirect.
Tip 5: Ensure that your content is unique throughout the website. Make sure the copyright information on your website is up to date and if you notice any external website using your copy, you can file a complaint with DMCA for copyright infringement.

To be concluded in the next blog post.

Contributed by Zuheb SM

• Website Architecture & SEO: The dark side of the moon (2)
• SEO Competitive Analysis (7)
• Tag Clouds and #SEO (0)