Site architecture Overview – WebPro SEO

Site architecture refers to how well a website is organized: how pages can be accessed from anywhere within the site, how they interlink with each other. The main three features of site architecture include: Sitemap, URL structure and Internal Linking. Overall, site architecture is an important on-page SEO-factor which in part determines your site’s rankings.

URL Structure

Optimizing ULR structure is a quick yet extremely effective way to help site’s rankings and promote branding. This is especially simple to do on html websites, where all you need to do is to name the files as needed. If you have database-driven site (e.g., WordPress blog) you need to check Content Management System (CMS) help files or consult a specialist. WordPress CMS, for example, allows doing that easily by making use of a plugin. The idea of adjusting the pages’ ULR structure is to make them search engines- and user-friendly, and sticking to the following rules will help you:

  • Use the main page keyword, its variation or page title  tag in the URL

  • Use hyphens between the multiple words in the URLs

  • Make URLs short

  • Make URLs static (rather than dynamic)

  • Get rid of any unneeded data

 

EXAMPLES

Dynamic vs. Static
http:// www.mysite.com/services.php?id=43&cat=2&page=32 – dynamic URL
http:// www.mysite.com/hosting-packages.html – static URL

Unneeded data
http://mysite.com/category/category12/page2.html - ‘raw’
http://mysite.com/ category12/page2.html - cleaned

Catering for Non-Existing URLs

If you change URL structure to make it user-friendly or simply remove some pages when they no longer serve the purpose, the best way to take care non-existing URLs is by using 301 (or permanent) redirect. The power of this method is that if the old (non-existing) URL already ranked in search engines by using 301 redirect you can delegate its ranking to a new page (URL) that replaces the old one.

The way to setup 301 redirect depends on your web hosting and type of OS you have (Unix or Windows). So you should talk to your hosting support to help you. After you setup the permanent redirect make sure you check in a browser that the old URL gets redirected to the new one.

Sitemaps

Sitemap by itself doesn’t help you with ranking, but it helps search engines to find all you pages and get your site properly indexed. This is important, as non-indexed pages for search engines are like non-existing pages, and thus you may be missing on traffic coming from naturally ranking long-tail keywords contained on those pages.

Another method of how you can help search engines index your site by building links to all your pages, but sitemap is obviously an easier and less time-consuming way of doing it.

Google Sitemaps

You can submit your sitemap to your Google Webmaster panel, and this won’t only speed up indexing your site, but will also offer a number of additional data:
  • The last crawling time of your site
  •  List of indexed pages
  • Pages not indexed
  • Additional index stats
  • Internal linking analysis
  • Shortcuts to check your index status in Google
and more. Overall, Google sitemaps is an excellent way to pin point any crawling and/or indexation problem your site might be having and is surely worth using.

Internal Linking

Internal linking can have a small or a huge effect on site’s search engine rankings depending on its size (the bigger the site, the stronger the effect). Generally, there are three parts to the internal linking: site navigation, type of linking and use of anchor text.

Site Navigation

Site navigation is an essential part of on-site optimization and website usability. An efficient navigation structure would be if the menu items link to your category pages, and those in turn link to your deeper (subcategory and/or article) pages. It’s also common, especially on bigger sites, to have two menus – the main and secondary menus. The main menu includes category and article pages, whereas the secondary menu includes information pages such as About us, Contact us, FAQ, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy etc.

In-Context Linking

Practice shows that in-context links are more valuable in terms of passing juice than stand-alone links (e.g., links in the footer, sidebar or from linking pages). This is applicable to both internal and external (off-site) links.

As far as internal linking is concerned, you need to make sure that all related pages and keywords are interlinked with each other. Do not overdo it though, provide linking only where it’s required by the context and improves site usability (navigation, finding specific information etc.)

The beneficial effect of interlinking on rankings is especially profound for big sites with lots and lots of pages. If the site also has high trust and authority with search engines (like Wikipedia, for example) it may enjoy high rankings on long tail keywords without any backlinks at all.

Anchor Text

It is extremely important to use your main keywords when creating links to your site’s pages. When inbound links use the wrong anchor text (clickable text in a link) they are not informing the search engines what this site is about and thus link juice gets wasted. Having link with the wrong or irrelevant anchor text is like trying to hit a target blindfolded.

Ideally you want most of your backlinks with the right keyword pointing to the right pages on your website. However, the reality is that when people naturally put up links to your site, they often don’t bother about choosing the ‘right’ keyword and may use your site URL or words like “click here” etc. If that’s the case then in order for search engines to determine what is your site’s topic they use context surrounding the links on the donor sites (i.e. site linking to yours).

Therefore, having your links from topically related websites or at least from topically-related articles on other sites is very important to help your site rank on the relevant keywords. Here, if a lot of inbound links don’t use the right anchor text, proper on-page SEO maybe one of the decisive factors in helping your site rank.

Summary

Having a clear website structure – well-defined single-topic categories, subcategories and article pages within categories and/or subcategories is an effective way to make your site more user- and search engines friendly and thus improve its chances for better rankings.

Here internal linking is one of the most crucial aspects of site architecture – not only can smart internal lining speed up crawling of internal pages by search engines thus improving overall site indexing, it can also send link juice to the most important pages on your site thus improving their rankings. Finally, good internal linking also improves site navigation.

In summary:

  • Setup distinct categories including article on a single well-defined topic

  • Cross-link articles from various categories if they contain related information

  • Add categories into the main site’s menu

  • Have both internal linking and menu-navigation to maximize exposure of the most important site pages

  • Make use of sitemap to improve your site indexing and ease site navigation.


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