Site
Structure with SEO in mind
Site
architecture with SEO in mind
When building a
website many people forget to
build it for SEO. That is the
farthest thing from their mind.
They have so much to consider
and just the design aspect seems
to take control and begins to
take precedence. This is by far
the most costly mistake a website
owner can make. Site architecture
does not have to be a gross process
and can be quite easy to take
into consideration if you know
what to look for.
Spiders
When a spider or robot comes to
index and cache your page it reads
your websites source code like
a book. The only thing different
is that the spider is usually
limited in how much it can read.
For most spiders you are looking
at 100k so anything after that
100k probably isn’t going to be
read.
HTML
elements that truly matter
When you are building your site
make sure you use the following
html codes for optimal site structure.
<title>major
keywords go here</title>
<meta name="keywords"
content="…">
<meta name="description"
content="…">
These codes allow
you to tell the spiders a little
more about your site right away.
You are insuring that the search
engines WILL know exactly what
your site is about.
Now when a search
engine attempts to read your code
they pay special attention to
your h tags. H tags are basically
header tags which begin paragraphs
with a title. Spiders pay close
attention to these tags because
they normally describe what your
paragraph is talking about. If
you add your meta keyword and
description in then you should
have a code like this.
<head>
<title>My title goes here</title>
<meta name="keywords"
content="keyword 1, keyword
2, keyword 3">
<meta name="description"
content="site description">
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is the first level
heading which is important to
the search engines</h1>
<h2>this is a kind of subheading
which is also important</h2>
This is a simple text in the body
of the page. This content must
include a minimum of 100 words,
with keyword density around 3%
to 7%, maximum keyword prominence
to the beginning, middle and end
of the page, and maximum keyword
proximity.
<b>This text will show in
bold</b>
<a href="http://www.somesite.com"
title="some widget site">Link
to some widget site</a>
<img src="http://mysite.com/image.jpg"
alt="and this is my image"
/>
</body>
Your H1 tag should describe your
site and your h2 tag should describe
the following paragraph.
Tables
SEO’s try to stay away from using
tables if possible, because they
take up to much room in our source
code. If you are optimizing a
site that’s already built we have
to usually work around this but
if you have the ability to start
from scratch then here are some
tips. Here is an example of source
code for a table and some text.
<TD vAlign=top
border=2 width=400 height=600>
<P align=center><FONT
size=4><FONT face=Arial
color=#006100>We sell all over
Orange County</FONT></p></td>
Instead use CSS
(cascading style sheets). Here
is the code for the same thing.
<span class="mystyle">
We sell all over Orange County
</span>
2 other reason to
use CSS are as follows:
CSS
is web 2.0 compatible
When coloring text and table backgrounds
some search engines might see
this as spamming although its
incidental and not on purpose
this might happen.
Site architecture
is not an easy process but stay
tuned as these are the first steps
you need to address when building
a site for SEO. Stay tuned because
I will be publishing the second
phase shortly!
