Internet Marketing Blog

5 Ways to Improve Your Site’s Architecture for SEO

July 24, 2008 – 9:03 pm

The way your site is built is critical to successful longterm SEO success. Although it’s entirely possible to throw together an html page with a bunch of links and some basic meta tags, these pages quickly outlive their usefulness over time.

The best way to insure longterm ROI through SEO is to build your site according to standards. Standards such as XHTML 1.0, POSH and CSS 2.0 insure interoperability among devices (including phones), browsers and operating systems. Standards are important and often include the major things you need in a successful SEO architecture.

Here are 5 Ways to Improve Your Site’s Architecture for SEO in no particular order.

• Simple to edit. Often overlooked this simple feature makes it possible for you to easily and quickly adjust the content of your site. Adding pages or posts to your site with title, headings and text that reflect relevant user searches is essential to a healthy site that’s highly visible in major search engines. When your site is easy enough to edit you can add additional editors thus increasing the relevancy and content of your pages.
• Page and content structure. Keyword research and SERPS (search engine results pages) dictate the creation of appropriate landing pages for your site, a critical success factor. Making sure your page structure supports the easy inclusion of semantic titles, headings, tags, categories (folders of content) and seo-friendly urls will help improve your site’s SEO. Navigation on your pages should be text-based so the search bots have something to crawl. <H3> tags should follow <H2> tags. <H2> tags should follow <H1> tags.
• Code inclusion. Your architecture should include the easy creation of relevant meta-tags on individual pages. Tools like Dreamweaver allow for this in the individual page properties while plugins for WordPress like “All in One SEO” create the tags and code auto-magically based on the titles you set. Creating keyword and link rich error pages, especially 404’s can also be helpful. An XML-based or other sitemap created according the the sitemap protocol is helpful. Heading tags and relevant anchor text should be part of standards-based code inclusion.
• Rich media. An architecture that supports rich media will help improve your site and help insure longevity. In addition to improving your “time-on-site” numbers, rich media offers additional opportunities to detail your content for search bots and screen readers. Making your videos and podcasts accessible means including a text alternatives like a transcript of the video and audio.
• Accessibility. Making your website accessible for for persons with disabilities is one of the best design and architecture moves you can make. For example, we know that including alt text in your pages is essential but an accessible architecture will demand such inclusions for images, audio and other forms of rich media. There are many parallels between web accessibility and SEO and an accessible site is recommended in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Additional Resources

Tips for making information universally accessible
http://tinyurl.com/257mnk

Showing posts with label accessibility. Show all posts Design patterns for accessible, crawlable and indexable content
http://tinyurl.com/5cnx2x