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Site architecture with SEO in mind
When building a website many people forget to build it for SEO. That is the farthest thing from their mind. They have so much to consider and just the design aspect seems to take control and begins to take precedence. This is by far the most costly mistake a website owner can make. Site architecture does not have to be a gross process and can be quite easy to take into consideration if you know what to look for.
Spiders
When a spider or robot comes to index and cache your page it reads your websites source code like a book. The only thing different is that the spider is usually limited in how much it can read. For most spiders you are looking at 100k so anything after that 100k probably isn't going to be read.
HTML elements that truly matter
When you are building your site make sure you use the following html codes for optimal site structure.
<title>major keywords go here</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="...">
<meta name="description" content="...">
These codes allow you to tell the spiders a little more about your site right away. You are insuring that the search engines WILL know exactly what your site is about.
Now when a search engine attempts to read your code they pay special attention to your h tags. H tags are basically header tags which begin paragraphs with a title. Spiders pay close attention to these tags because they normally describe what your paragraph is talking about. If you add your meta keyword and description in then you should have a code like this.
<head>
<title>My title goes here</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3">
<meta name="description" content="site description">
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is the first level heading which is important to the search engines</h1> <h2>this is a kind of subheading which is also important</h2>
This is a simple text in the body of the page. This content must include a minimum of 100 words, with keyword density around 3% to 7%, maximum keyword prominence to the beginning, middle and end of the page, and maximum keyword proximity.
<b>This text will show in bold</b>
Link to some widget site
<img src="http://mysite.com/image.jpg" alt="and this is my image" />
</body>
Your H1 tag should describe your site and your h2 tag should describe the following paragraph.
Tables
SEO's try to stay away from using tables if possible, because they take up to much room in our source code. If you are optimizing a site that's already built we have to usually work around this but if you have the ability to start from scratch then here are some tips. Here is an example of source code for a table and some text.
<TD vAlign=top border=2 width=400 height=600>
<P align=center><FONT size=4><FONT face=Arial color=#006100>We sell all over Orange County</FONT></p></td>
Instead use CSS (cascading style sheets). Here is the code for the same thing.
<span class="mystyle"> We sell all over Orange County </span>
2 other reason to use CSS are as follows:
A) CSS is web 2.0 compatible
B) When coloring text and table backgrounds some search engines might see this as spamming although its incidental and not on purpose this might happen.
Site architecture is not an easy process but stay tuned as these are the first steps you need to address when building a site for SEO. Stay tuned because I will be publishing the second phase shortly!
About The Author
Joe Whyte is dedicated to educating the beginning Webmaster and SEO in preperation for real world experience. Find all your seo tips and tricks at Directoryrevolution.com.
Previously on SearchEngineChannel
- Why your site may not be fully indexed by Google
- How Not To Boost Google PageRank
- Required Search Engine Optimization Methods
- Unethical SEO Practices to Avoid
- Boosting search engine visibility with press releases
- Duplicate content Examined
- Keywords & Search Engine Optimization
- On Page Optimization Techniques
- Using MSN to get better search listings in Yahoo
- Predicting Search Engine Algorithm Changes
