People often ask us Can the Structure of Your Site have an Impact on SEO so we have made this post a guide. How do things like navigation, URL and site format as well as your link structure make an overall impact on how you rank in search. Since the release of the recent Google Panda updates, on-site SEO has assumed an even more important role with regards to being at the apex of the SEO game. Ranks are now dropped for little mistakes that could easily be disregarded with a little off-site optimization.
The major issue affecting many websites has to do with their structure. Their site navigation, URL format, and probably the biggest of them all, the structure of their internal linking, all have a lot of shortcomings. We intend to coach you on the best way to structure your site and improve your website’s SEO.
Format
Unfortunately, the URLs used by a lot of websites are below standard. They don’t convey to search engines the content listed there, and the URLs don’t have a set of keywords. Your pages ought to have their purpose expressed in their URL, regardless of whether your website is just an HTML website, a CMS or a blog with WordPress.
There are two things you should know. The first is that spaces should be replaced with dashes instead of underscores. Using underscores can lead to problems with search engines by lumping words together for the wrong keywords. The second thing you should note is that it doesn’t matter how established your website is, you can still fix your URL. All you have to do is to insert a 301 redirect for the pages you alter in your .htaccess file.
Site Navigation
There are two huge mistakes that are often repeated in website navigation. The first mistake is assuming that websites must use JavaScript and Flash menus. The second mistake is that websites make use of a ‘deep’ navigation structure. Spiders have problems crawling JavaScript and Flash links. Though some can actually get it done, the majority of them will rather ignore them.
The best option is to go for XHTML and CSS menus. Ensure that the file names are properly optimised and make good use of the alt and title features if you want to use images for your menus.
The navigational structure is another major issue. This is the number of clicks needed to arrive at the deepest content available on your website. If it requires going through a lot of clicks, there’s a probability of search engines ignoring it and with time they’ll stop indexing your content as regularly as they used to. Making the structure of your website shallow is the best way of fixing it. Certain experts of search optimization are of the opinion that, it should take not less than three or four clicks to go from the homepage of your website to your deepest content.
Another advantage of a shallow structure is that it boosts the user-friendliness of your website, which can lead to a reduction of your website’s bounce rate and eventually boost your SEO rankings.
Internal Link Structures
This is a frequently neglected element that is important to the success of on-site SEO, despite the fact that semantic searches are gradually becoming more common with every passing day.
Internal links make use of places that are keyword-rich which are contained in your text context to connect to other significant pages on your website. With this, search engines will find it easy to discover what your page is about. They can also use it to reduce page depth and help users discover related content with ease.
Internal links are very important because of the high value placed on them by search engines. It has gotten to the extent that certain experts in SEO have stated that semantic web searches have the potential to remove the need for off-site optimization, although we’re not yet at that level.