Site Architecture and SEO

A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO

A website’s architecture is fundamental to search engine marketing efforts so, in this stage of my guide, I’ll be covering some of the important technical considerations that should take place before your website is built. This article is most relevant to those planning internet start-up businesses, however, established small to medium size businesses may find this useful for reviewing existing websites. This article follows on from Part Five: Web Design and SEO. You can follow this guide from the start by reading my introduction.

Technical Set-up

When briefing a web designer or development team you need to ensure that they understand both your SEO objectives and the technical aspects of setting up a website to be SEO friendly. Many small business web start-ups assume that SEO is a process that occurs after their websites have launched. As mentioned in my previous post about website design, this can be a costly mistake. Poorly constructed websites can be difficult for search engines to crawl and index; correcting these issues can sometimes cost a lot of money. In order to avoid this you need to ensure the following:

• Your site should use HTML based navigation. Search engine spiders have difficulties following JavaScript navigation so you need to ensure that your web developer minimises the use of this scripting language or at least knows how to implement it in a manner which will not cause any crawling or indexation issues.
• Your site should minimise the use of Flash or AJAX technologies. Again, these technologies are not search engine friendly. The pervasive use of a technology such as Flash would make it virtually impossible for search engines to index your pages for your target key-phrases. This is because search engines can not effectively read the text element of Flash files.
• Your site should be built with a logical, flat-structure. Related pages on your site should be grouped in a meaningful and usable manner. Product pages, for example, should be categorised and easily reached; ideally in no more than 3 clicks from your home page. A flat structured site is easier for search engines to crawl and index than one which features many pages that are buried deep in the site’s architecture.
• Your internal linking structure should be consistent and usable. Where possible you should ensure that your internal links use your target key-phrases as the anchor text. Your internal links should make it easy for search engines and users to find relevant content. Your linking structure can be thought of like library archiving. In order to be able to retrieve the correct information/book, it must be filed and marked correctly.
• Your site should use effective cross-linking and breadcrumbs. This is particularly important for e-commerce and large scale sites. Breadcrumbs, for example, will enable users to know exactly where they are in your site navigation whilst also enabling search engine spiders to crawl your site more efficiently. Cross-links enable you to connect related pages from different categories in your site. Effective cross-linking can help to keep your site structure flat, which is the ideal set-up for search engine crawling and indexation.
• Your site should be set-up to create static URLs. If you’re planning on creating web pages on your new site yourself using a Content Management System (CMS), you should ensure that your system avoids dynamic URLs. If you’re planning on creating a bespoke CMS to administrate your site, you must ensure that your developers are aware of your SEO objectives as sites generated by databases can present crawling and indexation issues.
• Your CMS should enable you to integrate key-phrases into URLs. Many open source platforms such as WordPress (see Part Eight: WordPress and SEO) are configurable and will allow you to do this. However, again, if you’re using a bespoke CMS this needs to be included in the web development brief.
• Your site should avoid session IDs in URLs. Use of session IDs is quite common place on e-commerce sites, however, you need to ensure that these are not included in the URL structure for individual web pages. This will again cause crawling and indexation issues.
• Your site should enable you to implement standard HTML markup for individual pages. Again, if you are creating web pages on your site using a CMS, you should be able to implement standard HTML tags such as headers and use of bold.

Site Architecture and SEO Checklist

• Ensure that your web development team understand site architecture issues
• Contract an SEO consultant to work with your development team, if necessary
• Ensure that the technical considerations outlined above are followed

Part Seven

In part seven I will cover the topic of Content Management Systems in more detail and offer advice on the best systems available for small business enterprises considering SEO. Click here to go to part seven.