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Upon completion of the keyword selection and competitor analysis, you’re ready to do some ‘on-site’ work to the structure of your website.

Of the three factors of SEO (Structure, Content, and Linking), I believe the structure of a website to be one of the most often overlooked elements in web development, even among search engine optimization companies. The structure of a website consists of several key elements . These include the code behind your website, how your website pages link to each other, and the technologies used in your website.

We’ll get right into developing a proper structure for your website, from the ground up.

Website Templating

I feel I must stress my extreme hatred towards Dreamweaver templates. As a SEO / Web Developer, I strongly urge you to stay away from them.  If you’re going to template a site, use Server Side Includes, PHP Includes, or ASP includes. Here’s why Dreamweaver templates are the devil.

• Embedded comments in your code can drastically throw off your keyword density measurements.
• If you need a non standard footer in an index file you will need to break it from the template, creating issues for future template updates.
• If you have a disagreement with your web developer / designer and you part company if he doesn’t supply you with the template it’ll cost you.

When developing websites, I prefer to use PHP for implementing Server Side Includes. PHP is a relative easy language to learn for implementing simple things like includes.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

As an SEO enthusiast, one thing that I can’t stress enough is try to stay away from Dynamic URLs. These are URL addresses with variables, and values following the “?” character. Google used to state that it had troubles indexing sites with dynamic URLs, and to a degree this still holds true. If you are going to use Dynamic URLs always try to have less than 2 variables in your URL.

A better approach is to URL Rewrite your URLs. For the Linux side, Apache has Mod Rewrite, and for Windows you can use ISAPI Rewrite. When you implement a URL Rewriting system you are essentially creating a hash URL lookup table for your site, than when a server query comes in it checks the hash table to see if it finds a match then feeds it the corresponding entry.

To put it into simple terms what we strive to accomplish with URL Rewrites is to mask our dynamic content by having it appear as a static URL. A URL like Article?Id=52&Page=5 could be rewritten to /Article/ID/52/Page/5/, which to a search engine appears to be a directory with an index.htm (or whatever default / index page your particular web server uses).

Dynamic Websites and Duplicate Content

If there is one reoccurring problem I see in a lot of dynamic websites on the internet is that they can sometimes present the same content on multiple pages. An example of this is when you visit a website that allows you to “view a printer friendly version of this page”, a better web solution implementation would be to develop a printer friendly Cascading Stylesheet.

Another goal is also to avoid having any additional URLs on you site such as Links for changing currency with a redirect script, links to “Email to a friend” pages, or anything related to this. Always use Forms to POST date like this so that the same page, or a static page to reduce page count. This issue seems to plague a lot of custom developed ecommerce / CMSes. I’ve actually see CMSes that will present up to 5 URL / Links for each page, in the long run the spiders got so confused in indexing the catalog that some of the main content pages were not cached.

Internal Site Navigation

If built properly, most websites will never have a need for an XML Sitemap, other than to get their new pages indexed that much quicker (Ecommerce & Enterprise being exceptions). I will however recommend that every website have a user accessible Sitemap linked from every page to aide your users, and for internal linking.

Most sites with indexing problems have issues with their internal page linking structure. The biggest of all these issues are websites that implement pure javascript navigation based system, these systems depend on Javascript to insert HTML into pages as there rendered. Now Google can parse javascript menus to find URLs, however all of these pages will only be linked from the JS, and not the pages there located on (expect no internal pagerank passing). The best Javascript menus are menus that manipulate your code on your page to change which sections are being displayed via CSS. Keep I mind the more internal links you have to a page, the more internal strength this page will be given. So when in doubt link it up.

As nerdy as most of the above probably sounds, your web developer should understand it… If they don’t, better yet if they’re not practicing these methods, fire them! They’re only hurting your search engine optimization efforts.

As usual, we strongly encourage you to call us at Primary Target. Don’t worry, we can stay away from the above ‘techy jargon’, and lay it down in english.

 We’re creative web developers and markters first… nerds second.