Site Architecture

By Ricky Dawn Friday, 8th July 2011

Site architecture is an important part of any SEO campaign, you need to have your website in top shape on page before you can think about building backlinks or marketing it effectively.

Search engines love a clean URL structure, they dont want to see ugly URLs like:

http://www.example.com/product/ref=s9_simh_gw_p147_d0_i2
pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1JDPZRT1QWF.......

Search engines want to see people look after their sites, treat them with care and love, search engines like sites with URLs like this:

http://www.example.com/product/wisconsin_in_black_leather

Having a clean URL structure also helps you rank for the keywords you want to rank for, it allows you to place keywords in the URL which gives a huge boost to SEO especially when targeting long tail keywords with little competition. A clean URL also looks a lot better so if its posted to social bookmarking sites it is far more likely to get clicked or linked to.

A well known quote to keep in mind when doing your sites architecture is “Google does not rank websites they rank pages” this basically means treat each individual page like the homepage, you wouldn’t buy the domain www.345?&24.com so why let your pages have rubbish URLs.

Your website should have a hierarchy site architecture, and your pages should be no more then 3 clicks away from the homepage. This will improve your chances of having all your web pages indexed by the search engines, it also gives your visitors a much better browsing experience. Your sites architecture should look something like this:

When using a hierarchy site structure it allows you to have a separate page for each product or service, which means more URLs with keywords in, that will then give you more opportunities to rank for different keywords. When using this structure, it’s good practise to use ‘breadcrumbs’ so your users know where they are on your site at all times, it also allows them to easily go back to the previous page..

Changing your Permalinks in WordPress

If you’re using WordPress then you should change your permalinks. You do this by clicking on ‘Settings’ then on ‘Permalinks’.

Once you are on the permalinks page you should click on the ‘Custom’ option and put in /%postname%/

Click save and you’re done, your URLs will now be pretty. There are a lot of different things you can do with the permalinks like show ‘tags’ or ‘categories’ in the URL and they could be useful to you. I reccomend taking a look at the WordPress Codex there you will find all the structure tags you can use.

After completing your site architecture you’re ready to look at optimising your on page SEO and getting some backlinks to your site.

If you have any questions about your websites architecture or you’re having trouble setting it up please leave me a comment and I’ll get right back to you!

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