Loading ...The architecture of a website walks a fine line between search engine optimisation, benefiting the website traffic and pleasing the search engines. The ideal is to create a website that is lean, flat and easy for search engines to crawl and visitors to use. Bloated website architecture makes it extremely difficult for both the crawlers and the visitors. It is hard to work their way through your entire website.
Visitors will get annoyed if they have to sift through layer upon layer to get to where they want to go. The crawlers will simply start crawling your website less frequently. An e-commerce website usually has its product lists on the last pages. The less levels between the homepage and the products lists, the better. Fever levels give a much better distribution of page rank from start to finish. The ideal number of levels when doing website architecture is four. Thus from the homepage to the category page, then to the brand page, to be followed by the product pages.
Tools to spot problems
Broken links, both external and internal cause huge problems and costs valuable potential clients. There are several tools available that will crawl your website for broken links and report on them. Trying to check broken links manually can become a mammoth task for a very large websites. The same applies for server problems. Install a checking tool so that you can test for broken URLs. It is no use to wait and let things slide, it will simply get worse. There are so many tools freely available to fix broken links and broken or faulty ULS immediately when they happen, that it would be irresponsible not to use them.
Ongoing vigilance
One of the best practices of SEO is the ongoing diagnoses and fixing of any duplicate content on your website. It does not matter if the search engines have given your website the authorised [canonical] tag; it is simply common sense to be vigilant at all times. Regularly check your indexed pages and if suddenly there is a huge difference, its time to investigate. Google and Yahoo have excellent tools for this task. Check for multiple repeats of results that have the same description or title. Check for query strings and malformed URLs as well.
Pages that have been orphaned
This is something to guard against, as orphaned pages create unwanted problems, especially when you have moved to a new platform. This also happens easily when there have been fundamental changes to the design of your website and structure of your URLs. It is a serious ranking killer if you have pages on your website that has no internal linking. The thing to do is to guard against orphaning pages as it is a herculean task to check for this in large websites. You can pick up orphaned pages when you crawl your website for broken links. Keep your crawl reports and compare them for noticeable differences in URLs. Check where the gaps are as it will show you where orphaned pages have occurred.
Related posts:
- Four ways to check the health and status of your website
- URLs and keywords: caution
- Three development trouble areas for SEO
- SEO and web design goes hand in hand
- How search engine friendly is your website?
Tags: SEO, SEO Design, SEO Tips
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