Website Architecture & SEO: The dark side of the moon

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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

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Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, site architecture, website architecture, Website Calibrator, website design architecture, website structure