SEO Step By Step Guide– 146. Pay Attention to Your Website’s Structure

In the previous post, we noted the importance of getting all the pages of our website indexed. In continuation with the previous post, we shall see one of the important factors that is essential for getting all the pages indexed by the search engines and that is your website structure. We cannot emphasize enough here the importance of having a search engine friendly website structure.

Simple and easy to follow website structure will make things easy for your website visitors as well as for the search engine spiders. Try to come up with a structure whereby all the pages can be accessed with a maximum of three clicks. Have a clear site navigation menu and your navigation menu will do much better if you have a horizontal html menu rather than using Java Script navigational menus and dropdown lists. Java Script menus may be visually appealing, but they are not search engine friendly. Also, remember to include links to your main pages in the footer of your page. It is recommended that in your site structure develop links to your main pages more often than less important pages. Try to place links to all your important pages in the home page.

One of the effective ways of using links for large sites is to use breadcrumbs structure on each page. This will make things easy for your visitor when he or she wants to move back and forth your website. Search engines will also be able to dig deep in to your site using this type of linking. By breadcrumb linking, we mean the following style:
Home> Services> Category>Sub-category
Home > Products> Category>Sub-category

When you are creating internal links within your website, make sure not to over do it; too many internal links to the same page using the same keywords can make it look like spam links so do not draw such negative attention from the search engines. Try to balance the keywords that you use for linking the internal pages.

Most of the ecommerce sites have poor architecture in terms of search engine friendliness. Most of the pages in an ecommerce site can be accessed only through the internal site searches. Such pages are virtually non-existent for the search engines. You will put yourself to disadvantageous situation by not getting the benefit of those pages. You can overcome this problem by introducing an elaborate sitemap for your website. Add both HTML sitemap for your website visitors as well as XML sitemap or Google Sitemap for the search engines. Using these sitemap search engines will be able to index all the pages that are not otherwise possible to reach in its regular crawling cycle.

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