SEO and Website Structure
Humans and search engine bots alike both require and benefit from an easily navigated website structure, where sections are logically separated and linked to and from by other portions of the site. Individual pages must be constructed and coded in a way that enhances the content that they contain and allows it to be easily read by a digital program or reader's eyes. These pages should be easily accessible and with a URL and tags that are appropriate to the topic. Important information, essential to an understanding of the page's content, should be included in standard text and not as part of a graphical image. Internal linking should be based around text links, ensuring that everyone can navigate around the site and plugins should not be required to make sense of a website. Use of the latest whistles and bells, without attention to the majority of users, may cause your site to be too much of a headache to cosider revisiting; bots may not be able to find the quality content you are publishing. Keeping things simple and following a few simple pointers, however, can make your site both easy to index by the bots and more user friendly for your visitors.
An easily navigable and logical site tree...
The key things to remember when planing the structure of your site are the need to minimise the number of clicks required to get to a particular page, presenting that sequence of clicks in a logical fashion and building the site and its various sections in a way that can accommodate its future development. For example, a global travel site that is intended to have thousands of pages may be structured in the following way - Homepage > Choose Country > Choose City > Choose Essential Info / Recommended Entertainments / Accommodation etc. An online book retailer's site may be structured like Homepage > Choose Category > Choose Author > Choose Title. It would be impossible, and far too confusing and complicated, in both these instances to have links from the homepage to every other single page of the site. A series of simple choices is far better than to present the user with information overload.
URL and site structure...
When it comes to SEO it is advisable to make the most of the URL that will be used by each of the site's pages. A page about Morocco, for example, would be far better occupying the URL yourholidaysite.extn/africa/morocco/ rather than the non informative yourholidaysite.extn/page113.html as the former includes basic information that is keyword related to the content of the destination page. If you have a dynamic database driven site, say written in PHP and using a MySQL backend, the standard URLs created may be along the lines of myforum.extn/showthread.php?t=32412 which contains nothing to indicate the discussion topic in the thread. In this instance use of a URL rewrite engine or module will give SEO benefit to the site and easier to identify URLs for the end user. The extensively used mod_rewrite module for Apache servers rewrites URLs on the fly according to a sequence of rules which will create a search engine friendly URL along the lines of myforum.extn/section-title/32412-title-of-thread.html which contains far more pertinent information.
Internal Links...
One of the worst new webmaster habits is to create neat graphics or buttons for their site's various menu elements. These are then used without alt tags or alternative text-only links. This can present bots with indexing issues and also make it impossible for anyone unable to view the images to navigate around the site. A far better alternative is to use standard text links (with appropriate Anchor Text) defined as a separate style class, whereby the font, colour and background can be controlled from the style sheet. Internal links should also be fully qualified URLs and not just addresses relative to the page on which the link appears.
Meta Tags including Head Title, Description and Keywords...
Each page should firstly contain a !DOCTYPE declaration which tells the user's browser or agent the markup language being used and consequently the set of rules for display that it will need to follow. The data included within each page's head (between <head></head>) is crucial when constructing a page, even though much of it is not seen by the human reader. It should contain a series of declarations including Title, a short (10 words max) but keyword rich overall heading for the page, the "Description" which should be a slightly longer (approx one sentence) summary of the page's purpose and content, and a series of "Keywords" which should be those individual words and phrases most relevant to the page in question.
Image Alt tags...
The Alt tag ( identifiable in the source code by alt= ) is important for accessibility and SEO and attention to them should not be neglected, especially if an image is being used as a link. A great amount of SEO benefit can be derived from appropriately labelled pictures and it also presents a text alternative to those users unable to view a site's images. This does not mean that it should be abused with a whole paragraph; a simple couple of words description should normally suffice.
Relevant h1 and h2 etc headings and subheadings within the content...
A webpage may be split up into a number of logical parts, each being a subsection of the main topic. Use of h1 for the main heading and h2 for subheadings helps humans and search bots alike to identify the key areas being discussed. In the even of complex topics being split up into multiple levels the use of h3 and h4 may also be considered, although in most instances h1 and h2 should suffice.
Graphical Links to Sections or Pages...
If you insist on using graphics to link to other sections of your site it is important to remember to give each an Alt and Title (see sections above) to give an alternative text only link. You should also remember to use fully qualified URLs as discussed above
Flash Sites and 'Splash' Graphical Text...
Flash sites and pages created from a series of graphics can look great to the average viewer. This, however, does not mean that it looks the same way to a search engine. Text contained in a picture is not readable by a search bot and Flash content, although being visually appealing, does not make the text part of a page's source code and again the information cannot be read and disseminated by non-human visitors. Both Flash and picture content should be complimentary to the actual content of the page and not the sole element within it.
SEOServices.org.uk - Search Engine Optimisation Services - Page created October 2007 - Updated ?
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