Great search engine optimization cannot only be achieved through efforts on online marketing and site promotions. The structure of your website can also affect the way search engines would be able to crawl on your site, thereby improving your rankings. The structure of the site also makes it possible for you to easily target your market.

SEO/SEM Journal has enumerated several ways to improve the structure of your website and make it possible for the search engines to crawl over your site better.

1. Check and see that your site adheres to the W3C standards.

2. Make the site hierarchy flat and the site navigation simple. Pages should not be more than three clicks away from the homepage.

3. Carefully plan and categorize the pages of your site. Create separate structures for the different categories, putting in specific keywords or keyword phrases for better exposure to the search engine crawlers.

4. A web feed is a document or channel wherein its content has web links to longer (or the original) versions of it. Make sure to provide Web feeds to allow visitors to subscribe to them.

An example of a Web feed is the RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an XML based feed most commonly used in news, blogs, etc. RSS allows you to link to your pages and subscribe to the updates. It is automatically updated whenever new information is entered.

5. Don’t forget to add a sitemap. A sitemap contains the lists of links in a site and allows the search engines to crawl smoothly over your site. Keep the number of links in the sitemap within 100. If you have more then it is advised to have multiple but separate pages for your sitemap.

6. Robot.txt is a file that either permits or denies access to robots or crawlers to the different areas of your website. Search engine spiders and crawlers first look for this file before crawling around your whole site. But there are some that overlook this file and continue to crawl, and this should not be because it’s protocal to look over robots.txt first.

7. HTTP status codes like ‘404 Not Found’ should be handled with care to avoid getting removed from the search engines. For example, in cases of pages that after some time may become irrelevant or is not available, it would be better to redirect the user to a related page instead of using a 404 status code. This is to preserve link equity at the same time still offering what the visitor wants to view.

For more about proper website structure guidelines, click here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 9:09 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.