Defining Your Site's Information Architecture

Defining Your Site's Information Architecture:

Whether you are working with an established website or not, you should plan to research the desired site architecture (from an SEO perspective) at the start of your SEO project. This task can be divided into two major components: technology decisions and structural decisions.

Technology Decisions

Your technology choices can have a major impact on your SEO results. The following is an outline of the most important issues to address at the outset:

• Dynamic URLs

Although google now states that dynamic URLs are not a problem for the company, this is not entirely true, nor is it the case for the other search engines. Make sure your CMS does not end up rendering your pages on URLs with many convoluted parameters in them.

• Session IDs or user IDs in the URL

It used to be very common for CMSs to track individual users surfing a site adding a tracking code to the end of the URL. Although this worked well for this purpose, it was not good for search engines, become they saw each URL as a different page rather than variants of the same page. Make sure your CMS does not serve up session IDs.

If you are not able to to do this, make sure you use rel="canonical" on your URLs (what this is, and how to use it, you may further read on internet)

The?rel="canonical"?link?element?

A?rel="canonical"?link?element (also known as a?canonical element) is an element used in the?head?section of HTML to indicate that another page is representative of the content on the page.

Suppose you want?https://example.com/dresses/green-dresses?to be the canonical URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content.

• Superfluous flags in the URL

Related to the proceeding two items in the notion of extra junk being present in the URL. This probably does not bother Google, but it may bother the other search engines, and it interferes with the user experience for your site.

• Links or content based in Javascript, Java, or Flash

Search engines often cannot see links and content implemented using these technologies. Make sure the plan is to expose your links and content in simple HTML text.

• Content behind forms (including pull-down lists)

Making content accessible only after the user has completed a form (such as a login) or made a selection from an improperly implemented pull-down list is a great way to hide content from the search engines. Do not use these techniques unless you want to hide your content!

• Temporary (302) redirects

This is also a common problem in web server platforms and CMS. The 302 redirect blocks a search engine from recognizing that you have permanently moved the content, and it can be very problematic for SEO as 302 redirects block the passing PageRank. You need to make sure the default redirect your system use is a 301, or understand how to configure it so that it become the defaults.

All of these are example of basic technology choices that can adversely affect your chances for a successful SEO project. Do not be fool into thinking that SEO issues are understood, let alone addressed, by all CMS vendors out there-unbelievably, many are still very far behind the SEO curve. It is also important to consider whether a "custom" CMS is truly needed when many CMS vendors are creating ever-more SEO friendly systems- often with much more flexibility for customization and a broader development base. There are also advantages to selecting a widely used CMS, including portability in the event that you chose to hire different developer at same point.

Also, do not assume that all web developer understand the SEO implication what they develop. Learning about SEO is not a requirement to get a software engineering degree or become a web developer (infact, almost no known college courses address SEO). It is up to you, the SEO experts, to educate the other team members on this issue as early as possible in the development process.

Structural Decisions

One of the most basic decisions to make about a website concerns internal linking and navigational structures, which are generally mapped out in a site architecture document. What pages are linked to form the home page? What pages are used as top-level categories that then load site pages to other related pages? Do pages that are relevant to each other link to each other?

There are many, many aspects to determining a linking structure for a site, and it is a major usability issue become visitors make use of the links to surf around your website. For search engines, the navigation structure helps their crawlers determine what pages you consider the most important on your site, and it helps them establish the relevance of the pages on your site to specific topics.

Thanks

Contact Center Workforce Management and Quality Optimization Specialist.