CONNECTED TO THE HEART OF SEO

Website Architecture

Close to the heart of SEO comes website design and development. The structure of a site is crucial for SEO to work whatsoever, as well as for letting users navigate through its material.

Much like traditional architecture, website architecture consists of technical, aesthetic, and functional criteria that must be met ad excelled. This is why SEOs isn’t an end-all or solitary discipline and it must work hand-in-hand with coders and designers. Without proper coding, a website will fall short of success, and without proper design, a site will also surely fail.

With this in mind, we should think of website architecture as a goal and action. It should always be a mission to appeal to two audiences: First, the search engines, and second, the users.

Order for the Web

The beginning of SEO begins with the indexing of content by search engine spiders, discovering and crawling links till they hit a dead-end. What is there to do at this step? Well, one needs to realize that what a user sees on a Web page is not the same thing that a spider sees. When a search engine attempts to read a page, it is limited by how the content is displayed as well as if it is reachable or not. Without a spider reaching a page structured in proper coding and text tags, it can return very little info back to a search engine’s databases. A great way to see if your site is up to par is to use the Google Cache feature which will display what it sees on a given page.

Segueing from that, it’s just as important to double-check that you have working link structures within your site. Orphaned pages will be ignored by spiders and they essentially become lost. A link may be broken for one of several possibilities, most often because it’s an unfinished or mistyped link tag. Past that, many links can be rendered unreadable depending on where they lay. Pages that can only be reached by a site search, a form, flash, java and other plug-ins are unreachable by spiders, as well as pages blocked by meta robots.

*Rel=”nofollow” is a very important tag to know to purposely block spiders from accessing a particular site page. Though this sounds like a step back, we want to make sure that pages such as submission forms, contact forms, user comments or whatever you believe isn’t a public page item to be searched for is blocked off from the spiders.

Also extremely important are a site’s usage of title tags, keywords, meta tags, and meta descriptions. Title tags are potential search-gold in the SEO world, so they must be used wisely and made accurately. As are keywords, yet this doesn’t mean to stuff your content. Do your keyword research and apply in title tags and other areas when applicable. Meta tags can help guide the robots to perform certain functions on a given page, while meta descriptions provide an attractive ad listing on a SERP or directory.

*Duplicate content pages are yet another thing to battled as they can divide a site’s link juice. Luckily, there’s something called a Canonical URL tag that is designed to help divert spiders to only one page in a pair of duplicates.

POSITIVE USER EXPERIENCE

Ease for the User

The other half of the objective is to accommodate the user with smooth usability, a positive user experience, and good content. This is much where the aesthetics of website come in to play.

Sure, we have pages, information, tags, content and more, but how can it all be applied in a visually appealing and accessible way? Often the question is answered by a designer and that makes sense. This is totally an element in which one has to consider how the flow of a human’s eyes on a website. It’s knowing the science of user navigation and tapping into the genius of finding new and better ways to present an online world to a user. It can be laid out in a blueprint format or template.

Without that ease of finding content, bounce-rates skyrocket. There is so much on the Web today that without reaching out to a user and giving them a superior experience, they will opt out for a better service. It’s only natural for the user and it takes very little effort for them to do.

Something to keep in mind is that people are always searching on the Web, but it’s what they’re searching that can help break the process down and aid in designing a site. There are 4 types of searches people perform while on the Web:

  1. Navigational Searches – When a user is searching for a specific site yet doesn’t know the exact URL.
  2. Informational Searches – When a user is searching for a piece for information, not a specific site.
  3. Commercial Searches – When a user is searching with the intent gaining information on a potential business/commercial transaction or relationship.
  4. Transactional Searches – When a users aims to sign-up, subscribe, buy, or identify a business that you will make a purchase from.

Knowing these types of searches enlightens you on user intent. Always recognizing what a user is looking for and wants to crucial to delivering that content in a near-perfect format.

Making this all a 50-50 equation, 50% Web-geared and 50% user-oriented, is really the only way to design a successfully optimized website.

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