Loading ...For a place that is really created out of the arrangement of electrons rather than solid building materials, the internet can be a complicated landscape. Finding your way around the back alleys and main streets of the net is difficult enough. Finding your way around a maze-like website is something most internet users just don’t want to deal with.
It happens all the time. An internet user clicks into a site, and is welcomed by a fairly complicated home page. The user clicks on one of the hundreds of hyperlinks, trying to find their area of interest. They land on a page, which leads to another page, which leads around to yet another page, then back to one of the earlier pages… After all kinds of twists and turns, the internet user might find what they want buried deep within the site, but by that time return to Google involves about 20 clicks of the ‘back’ button.
Mazes are all too easy to create. Site owners start out with a simple idea, and tend to it with concern and care. After a while, though, adding pages here and there, the architecture of the site becomes less than clear, and the whole thing turns into an unnavigable mess.
If such a site was a house, it would look like something out of a Tim Burton movie. These sites are horrendously difficult for internet users to navigate, and search engine spiders, too. The SEO consequences are pretty dire:
- Internet users give up on the pages they’re trying to find, returning to the search engine results pages and your competitors
- Search engine spiders crawl across only the higher-level pages, completely missing all your hard work further down
- Linking sites link to pages that aren’t really relevant
- Low rankings.
When it comes to search engine optimisation, a simple structure works best. It’s easy to picture search engine spiders as creepy-crawly creatures feeling their way across the World Wide Web, but to that image must be added an element of laziness. If a path is too complicated for them, they won’t crawl down it.
SEO structure is always needed
Some sites dive the other way with their structure, making it too straightforward and overlooking search engine optimisation needs. A site with all pages linking directly to the home page and not to each other is just as likely to get bad rankings as a maze-like site.
It’s all about finding the right connections, and making them clear to Google and to your site users. Your site may have a hundred pages on the topic of puppy breeding, but unless they have clear links to each other in terms of keywords and internal links, your site just looks like a loose collection of pages.
Unless your site is the only one covering your topic of interest, you can’t afford to have a maze of a site. Virtually every site on the net is up against some really tough competition, meaning that the most understandable sites win.
No related posts.
Tags: Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.
