It sounds almost like a meeting of a town planning committee, but the structural integrity of your website can affect you just as much as the integrity of real-world premises. In the real world, structure prevents the ceiling from falling down. On the internet, a well structured site not only stays up, it flows traffic along well-chosen pathways and creates perceptions about the business.

Although the main three SEO elements, namely content, links and structure, rely on each other for support, structure is clearly the beginning. It is also possibly the most complicated. The various elements of a site’s structure all rely on each other, so that a site cannot be properly structured without thorough planning. There are some basic elements of structure that you can lay down in the design stages that will help your site’s search engine optimisation. These involve the technologies you choose to use, design elements, your site’s code, and the internal link plan.

Thorough Mapping for SEO

One of the best things you can do for the ranking of your website is draw out a map of all your pages and plot out links. Clear paths through your site to important pages will ensure the right areas of your site get indexed. This will also help you to plot out your internal links, which will provide great support for your SEO plan.

URLs and Search Engine Optimisation

Many SEO experts will talk about ’search engine friendly URLs’ without explaining exactly what this is. Basically, if a URL is easily understandable by a human, a search engine will like it too. More technically, your URLs should be steered toward keywords and brand names, and numbers or symbols should be avoided.

Weightwatchers for Code

One of the basic things an SEO expert will do to improve the way search engines crawl your site is to thin out your code. Code has a habit of building up over time. Even code for a brand-new site can be unintentionally clunky. This is because a web designer has the function of the site first and foremost in mind when writing code. One of the simplest improvements you can make on your code is to remove unneeded code. A lot of website creation software programs place chunks of unnecessary code into a site, and it is a good idea to have your SEO consultant review your site’s code to slim it down.

Efficiency Through Technology Choice

All the structural elements of your site may be impeded by the technology you use to build your site. A lot of your site’s search engine friendliness will depend on the technology used to create it, so it’s a good idea to consult your SEO firm before making a decision. Choose the wrong software, and search engine spiders could trip up all over your site. The templates most software provides are also to be avoided as much as possible. Both search engines and site users get bored seeing the same thing over and over again.

When considering these complex and important points, it can be advisable to seek out the experience of professionals like those employed at SEO Consult.

Related posts:

1. Site Structure Will Affect Your Website Optimization Campaign
2. Are Basic Elements Hindering Your SEO Ranking?
3. SEO: Why Dynamic URLs are so Problematic
4. When Dynamic is Bad: SEO and URLs
5. SEO software consumer psychology

Tags: Copywriting, Keywords, seo, seo content, Web Design for SEO, Website Structure

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under About SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.