SEO Best Practices - Site Architecture

The order in which your pages and the folders containing them are arranged, what is usually referred to as your Site Architecture, has a huge impact on how well your site pages rank in search engine results. When structuring pages, you should name them after the keyword or keyword phrases you plan on using the page to target.

 If you give your pages file names that are not well defined, search engines will have no way of understanding what information or keywords they contain. For instance, lets look at the following url, http://www.ourschool.net/asd.php Because this page is not named according to its target keyword, it loses it’s SEO power.

We could tremendously improve this url by naming it, http://www.ourschool.net.net/after-school-daycare.php, this will carry more a good deal more influence with search engines because of it’s keyword rich architecture.

 We could give it even more keyword power and place it in a directory named /after-school-daycare/, so then our url would read http://www.ourschool.net/after-school-daycare/after-school-daycare.php. Now we are having a great deal more keyword power influencing our search engines.

Caution is advised with this technique, it must be used with restraint, too many keywords could very well be considered spamming by the search engines and get your site penalized for overdoing this strategy. There has also been some research to suggest click through rates are affected if the url is too long in the SERPs or contains more than three or four dashes, too many dashes can invoke distrust in viewers.

In my experience, improper site architecture is something that the vast majority of sites on the internet have had since their launch and is also one of the easiest to address in a lot of these cases, it's a good practice to address this and other on site search engine optimization issues first before diving into strategies for external link building since proper site architecture is vital if you want to target the proper keywords. One of the problems presented with most online site builders is that you are not granted access to the underlying coding and also have little control over site architecture.

 If you would like your site evaluated for proper SEO architecture, contact us at our Charleston SEO website, we'll do an initial evaluation free of charge. - Brett Singleton

SEO Analysis Framework Intro

Hi all, moving my blog over to Blogger for certain SEO reasons I won't go into here. First of all I'm going to be shifting my basic seo baseline analysis frame to this blog for those of you who want to get an idea of just where your site is at in terms of basic seo.

I created this seo analysis frame for a friend of mine who sold a chain of businesses it took him many years to develop, unfortunately the individuals who bought them are not very forward thinking when it comes to web design. He wanted to demonstrate to them how bad off their sites were in a way that would open their eyes to the possibilities they could be tapping into. All he got from them were blank stares. You'll be hearing more about that later.

If you're the kind of site owner who thinks they know it all already because they went to Godaddy's Website Tonight and built their site in ten minutes, you probably won't get much out of this blog. In fact it will probably hurt your feelings. If you're willing to keep an open mind and embrace the truth that research and data have proven, you will get a lot out of this blog.

As for me I've been doing web development for over a decade and search engine optimization for quite a while and I still learn something new everyday, but that's only because I know that I don't know it all. Hang on to your hats, make sure your seat-belts are fastened, I'm about to take you on an SEO ride!