I am an Oxford based SEO, and I receive numerous questions – especially from small and medium sized businesses – about how they can optimise their website architecture in order to help them in their SEO efforts. Website architecture is animportant part of the overall search engine optimisation strategy. There are alarge number of literature covering the importance of website architecturewith two separate perspectives, both of which are extremely important for effective website optimisation. The first perspective is focused on the user and the user requirements; the other is focused on the search engine bots and the flow of ‘link juice’ (I will explain what link juice is and its role in SEO below). As a webmaster it is imperative that you get them both spot-on. Anecdotal evidence shows that there is a direct correlation between the two. When the user experience improves, so does the distribution of ‘link juice’ and vice versa. In this post I will be focusing primarily on the flow of ‘link juice’ and how you could use your website architecture to accomplish this.
Before we continue, it may be worth having an understanding of how ‘link juice’ works.There are many great resources that cover this topic, but for the purpose of this post I’ll provide an explanation with an analogy(please be forewarned that my use of analogies isn’t my strongestof skills; having said that, I’m giving it a go anyway!).
Links that point to your website brings along with it benefit to your site. A link to your site is similar to a vote. The benefit of all these links that point toward your site is what is known as ‘link juice’. Imagine for a moment the flow of water for the purpose of irrigation; the similitude of link juice here is that of water. Just as crops require water to grow, individual webpages require link juice to rank for search queries on search engine results pages (SERPs). The lack of water flowing into crops can result in the destruction of crops. Similarly the lack of link juice passing on to webpages can severely hinder its ability to rank and even get indexed by search engines.
Similar to how farmers distribute the flow of water to all its crops, good website architecture helps the flow of link juice to all your webpages, helping them rank well. Most often websites with architectural issues will behave similar to a dam. All its link juice will be blocked at the website’s homepage and wouldn’t allowthe flow of link juice to its category, subcategory and content pages. Recentlyhere at SEOptimise, we encountered this very problem with one of our clients. They were receiving thousands of links directed to their homepage but an entire section of their website was not indexed nor did it pass any link juice to its category or content pages. They were not leveraging the vast amounts of link juice they werereceiving due to poor website architecture (among other issues). Therefore, not only is it important to obtain high quality links (or ‘link juice’) to your site, but it is equally important to leverage link juice to help bolster the ranking ability of all your webpages.
I hope my (attempt at an) analogy helped you grasp the concept of link juice and how it ties in with website architecture. So how do you make sure your website architecture is SEO friendly? Find below a basic yet powerful list of tips that can help optimise the flow of link juice throughout your site.
Inspect your site’s global navigation
Most websites receive the highest number of backlinks to their website’s homepage. Therefore, in terms of link juice, homepages are generally rich. The medium by which link juice is distributed to the rest of the site is by using the global navigation menu. The global navigation helps link all category pages from the homepage.
In order to find common issues with the global navigation, disable JavaScript on your web browser (this will allow you to see what search enginessee) and check if the global navigation still works. If it doesn’t, then this is cause for concern and should be addressed immediately. The most SEO friendly global navigation menus appear as standard HTML unordered lists.Also observe if all the major sections of your website are linked to from the global navigation. As mentioned earlier, all major sections of your websitemust be leveraged using the homepage link juice.
Category and subcategory pages
Generally when a website has a sizeable number of webpages it is only logical to separate these pages by category. These pages serve two key purposes; first they need to be useful for users. For this not only will you need to make sure it’s simple for users to navigate through to content pages but you will also need to make sure that there is enough unique and useful content on these pages. Webmasters must put at least a minimal amount of effort into making these pages link worthy. Second they need to act as ‘link juice’ routers. The links that they receive from the homepage need to be distributed to the content pages. In fact, if optimised cleverly and strategically, category pages have a strong chance of ranking on the SERPs for extremely competitive keywords.
Content Pages
Content pages are the reason your visitors arrived at your site. In order to provide the most amount of ‘link juice’ benefit to your content pages, make sure the number of clicks to your content page is as minimal as possible (don’t hide your content 6-7 clicks away from the homepage). Also, in addition to making the content extremely relevant, you should make sure you make it easy for search engines to figure out the purpose of the page. In order to leave clues for search engines you can use the following:
- Title tags
- URL
- The actual content and
- Images
Title tags
Make sure your most relevant and targeted keywords are placed within the title tag of the page. Search engines generally display only 60-70 characters from the title tags on their search results page, so it is considered good practice to make sure you stick to this character limit. Personally, if the target keyword is extremely competitive I would place these keywords ahead of their brand name.
URL
URL structure is important because they’re a great clue for search engine bots to make sense of the site’s information hierarchy.
www.ExampleJewelleryStore.com/jewellery/engagement/rings/blue-saphire-rings/
The above URL clearly defines the architectural hierarchy of the site. It lets the search engine know that this page is specific to blue sapphire engagement rings (not merely the stone).
However, URLs that look like the following are not so clear about its architectural hierarchy or about defining the purpose of the page.
www.ExampleJewelleryStoreNumberTwo.com/products/sh01453868
Content
Although this is a no brainer, it is surprising as to how little thought is put into the actual content of many websites. Make sure content is unique and targets specific keywords. This does not mean stuffing your content with keywords, but make sure that the targeted keywords appear on your content naturally. It is also worth pointing out that attention should be given to spellings and grammar.
Images
Since of late there’s been much written about image optimisation and its correlation to attaining high rankings on SERPs especially on image searches. Therefore it is best practice to include the alt text attribute in all HTML code for images for all publicly accessible pages. This attribute declares what text should be displayed if the user is unable to view the image. Therefore you should make sure to include keyword rich and descriptive alt text.
These tips should put you in good stead when planning your site architecture. It’sobviously worth noting that website architecture is only part of the whole SEO process (albeit an important one). There are many more techniques and tips on improving website architecture. I would love to hear your thoughts, viewsand tips too. If I fell short in covering certain parts of this subject please feel free to question and discusswithin the comments below. I have also provided a list of some great resources to do some additional reading on this topic.
Author Bio
The author is an experienced Oxford SEO specialising in small business website optimisation.
Excellent post! Many thanks for sharing this. Website architecture can be many things for many different people but great to see an article focusing on the SEO side of things.
Another internal architecture tidbit I’ve been passing along to my clients is the concept of internal linking. Internal linking is absolutely essential for guiding search crawlers through your site while conveying relevance, quality and organization. It also gives visitors more information when they need it, which is a bonus. Drupal and WordPress have taken huge strides in automating internal links. The Alinks module in Drupal allows you to place anchor text (that leads to a relevant page of your choosing) around a keyword each time it is used on your site, which conveniently reduces the user’s job to standard keyword inclusion. The internal links basically implement themselves.
In WordPress, plugins like the RB Internal Links plugin allow similar rules to be set, but more in the content creation part of the process. You can recall various pages to which you want to link, as opposed to going to those pages to copy the URL and pasting it into the external link field.
If you aren’t setting up internal links every time you post a blog or article, you need to start immediately. It’s fast, and with one of the major CMS’s, they practically do it for you.
Nice to see the article on SEO which in today’s world makes or breaks a company. I have also found similar useful articles on ss3company.com website.
Thanks to you all guys for providing useful information.
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