The Critical Importance of Google-Friendly Website Architecture
Enrique Herbella | Posted on 2013-06-13Getting a website to appear at the top of a search engine results page is very competitive. Web design plays a big role in this competition.
Unfortunately, a lot of website owners think that web design is just for attractiveness. No one likes an unattractive and cluttered website. But while that is definitely true, it's also true that your web design has a lot to do with whether or not people find your website at all.
Website architecture matters, and can make a website successful. In this article, we'll point out how website architecture is just as much a part of strong SEO services as anything else.
Why Your Web Design Matters
In order to find the best websites for a particular keyword or topic, Google crawls through websites to see what's in their pages. The search engine “spider”, as it's called, goes from page to page, making connections and filing away what it knows about the website.
Making your website architecture easy to navigate for the spider (called “site crawlability”) is one of the best ways to make the features of your website stand out. After all, if the spider can't find a page, for example, it's as if it doesn't exist.
Even something as simple as having a search engine-friendly URL can make a world of difference (as we'll mention below).
Bad Website Architecture to Avoid
So, what makes for bad web design? Here are a few common mistakes people make with SEO services:
No search engine-friendly URL
Your URL to each page should make sense to humans and search engines alike. URLs like “http://store.website.com/93dj983/index.php?product=83392&sort=price1” aren't very friendly. Avoid using special characters; put hyphens in between your page title words; use keywords; and don't make them too long.
Broken navigation
Do you have broken links – links that don't go where they're supposed to? This hurts site crawability. Even search engine-friendly URLs won't do you much good if they are broken.
Improper use of certain features
Websites with Flash, frames, or Javascript can be difficult to navigate. Be careful when you use these features.
Unclear navigation
Your web pages should be ordered in a simple and clean hierarchy that makes sense, connects everything, is logical, makes every page easy to get to for humans and search engines.
What Google-Friendly Website Architecture Looks Like?
What are some good web design features to have? Strong SEO services providers will ensure your website has:
- Title, META, h1, h2, h3, and ALT Tags when appropriate, all SEO-friendly
- An XML sitemap
- Keyword-rich, search engine-friendly URLs
- Compressed CSS and JS code
- Easy-to-use navigation
- Smart robots.txt files
- 301 redirect pages instead of 302 pages
Contact EntrepreneurWeb.com for SEO services that provide smart web design and website architecture. Take that next step today.
