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