10 Issues to Consider When Reviewing / Designing Your Web Sites Architecture
1) I list this first because it is the most common problem with websites. Duplicate Pages!!! Each page should have only ONE URL. Many database driven web sites will generate multiple URLs for the same page depending on how a user drills down to the page. Search engines pick this up quickly and penalize the pages for duplicate content.
2) AVOID SESSION and USER IDs!!!! Just like #1 mentions, session ids and user ids create duplicate pages. Each time the search engine crawls the site a new session/user id is generated, thus creating many URLs for the same page.
3) Be sure to include text href links in your navigation and content. JAVA, Flash or other non search-engine friendly tech can be used in your navigation, just be sure to also include text links for the search engines. The more these text links are part of your actual navigation the better.
4) Keep your web sites navigation simple. Be sure to also keep your navigation consistent across the entire website. Your web site's navigational structure also ties directly into Google Sitelinks. Google will analyze a web sites link structure when crawling and watch for shortcuts to information users most likely are looking for. Then add Sitelinks to the search results.
5)Create a Site Map or multiple Site Maps. If your web site is considerably large, create multiple Site Maps that are interlinked and categorized.
6) Visible content. Search engines LOVE content. Don't bury your valuable content in Flash or JavaScript. Use visible text and use links within that text to assist the search engines in finding your most valuable pages.
7) Assign unique relevant page specific meta-tags. If you are developing a new website or looking at a CMS, double check that you will have the ability to assign page specific meta-tags, specifically titles.
8) Breadcrumbs. Users find breadcrumbs extremely helpful when navigating a site. For search engines they provide yet again more text links, so they are a plus. However, be careful when creating your breadcrumbs that you do not end up with back to back links.
9) If your website has a Calendar or other dynamically driven application that could result in an infinite loop, place a no index, no follow tag on the page, or block that page using a robots.txt file.
10) View your site through a text based browser such as Lynx. With no images, JAVA or other technologies, you are able to see what the search engines can see. Therefore you'll know if they can read your text and follow your links.
Labels: Organic SEO
posted by Andrea at
5:17 PM
2 Comments:
Interesting tips!
Just recently I had a discussion with a gentleman who owns the firm that does our company's content management system (who also assists clients with SEM and SEO). We discussed keyword density within meta tag keywords with regards to search engines. He stated that the more often the keyword appears in the keyword tags, the more relevant the search engines will find that particular page. (ex: popcorn, popcorn poppers, popcorn machines) However, it's stated on your meta tag optimization page that "Keywords should not be repeated".
Does this mean this should be used instead: "popcorn, poppers, machines,..."? Has this been a long-standing debate within the search engine marketing community?
Thanks Andrea - hope you, Larry, and Justin are doing well!
Jennifer Z.
Your comment about the CMS owner saying you should stuff keywords in meta keywords shows he has long obsolete knowledge of search optimization. That worked with AltaVista when AltaVista had market share. The main crawler-based search engines that feed 90%+ of today's natural search results -- Google, Yahoo and MSN -- have long not been affected by stuffing meta keywords. They either ignore meta keywords or place a small factor on search positions. But mostly they ignore meta keywords. You need to work on other areas to achieve search positions.
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