Learn Why Site Architecture Is Important In Determing Your Website Rankings

The structure of your website, or website architecture is critical when it comes to ranking well in not only Google, but every major search engine such as Bing and Yahoo. Website architecture has effects on your viewers experience and usability as well as how visible your site is to search engines and rankings. We will discuss some important factors of web design and architecture, and why they are important to your search ranking or on site search optimization in this article.

The number one key to website structure is making your website easy to navigate. The reason this is crucial for higher search rankings is Googles search bots for example, called spiders, will crawl your website much like your end website user will. If Google or Bing for example find your site structure confusing or clunky to navigate, it will reflect in a lower search ranking. A good website is one that is easy to navigate, where both users and search engines can find your content easily. key factors to this are is the websites page structure, the webpages readability and content, as well as the actual layout of the navigational elements of a websites user interface or simply put UI (User interface).

A websites taxonomy is also of key importance. Taxonomy is the layout, flow and grouping of key words, terms and subjects into groups, sections or hierarchies. A good site hierarchy of pages with clear easy to navigate interface elements helps users, both site viewers and search engine spiders find the pages or products they want with ease. A good website taxonomy makes your website not only easier to manage, but will make navigation of your website intuitive for both website viewers and search engine spiders.

User friendly URLs are also of key importance. You want your URLs to be readable, make sense and be understandable. URLs also should give the search spiders information. A URL for example of http://example.com/product.php?id=3434 means nothing to a search engine or an end user. A good URL example would be http://example.com/product.php?id=ultrashovel that tells the user and search engine the page is related to the product ” Ultra Shovel”, which is much better then “product id = 3434″. User friendly URLs will make your website look professional to both the end user and search engines, and help ensure that search engines get a better understanding of your webpages content. If you have dynamic URLs, you can look into URL rewriting for your websites server to get the user friendly URLs that you need. For WordPress sites and other CMS applications, making user friendly permalinks is easy to accomplish and will ensure that search engines crawling your website get the best understanding of your content.

Canonicals is another important factor of your website. You want your webpages to be accessible by only one URL per page, not multiple URLs to reach the same page. Not doing so can cause issues with search engine indexing of your site. If your webpages have several addresses to reach each page, set up 301 redirects or use the canonical tag on the proper main URL for that webpage.

One last factor to good on site optimization of your website is that of Meta Data. While meta data carries less weight with search engines these days, it is still a key factor to any successful website. These days meta data information will appear as snippets and link anchor texts in search engine result pages, so you want to have clear and concise meta data on every single webpage. This is especially important for eCommerce websites.