Step 3: Optimizing Site Structure

Let’s start our introduction into the site structure optimization by quoting Shari Thurow, the author of “Search Engine Visibility“, a renowned search engine expert with great experience in building websites for search engines.

Shari says, “Web site architecture is something I feel has been poorly addressed by search engine marketers. Reason? Many search engine marketers ONLY specialize in search engine advertising, or they ONLY specialize in search engine optimization. They do not create user-friendly websites for a living. They do not perform usability tests on page layout, site designs, and navigation schemes”.

We agree with Shari on this point. When properly composed, site architecture can significantly assist your business in getting high rankings, whereas a poorly structured website can nullify all your on-page SEO efforts.

Website structure does not belong to the category of on-page factors because it does not deal with the HTML code itself (except for the cases where it concerns the textual context of your links and navigation menus). Rather, it is about organizing files and directories and binding your pages by solid link relationships.

When a search engine spider crawls your site, it follows links from one page to another. However, most spiders are instructed not to go deeper than a certain number of links or directories away from the home page of your site. In this step, we’ll try to figure out the best way to lay out all your pages for indexing. Remember that the more pages you get indexed, the more chances there are for search queries to find you in the results.

The larger the website the more significant it is to have good site structure. The aim of site structure optimization is to achieve maximum exposure of your pages to the spiders (of course, this concerns only those pages that you intend to expose).

In the lessons of this step, we cover the following topics: how directories are set up on your server, how your site navigation is organized, what the URL structure of your site is and which types of Web pages you use, and naturally, the cross-linking system between your pages.

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