Website structuring for SEO

One of the most important factors in SEO is the structure of your website. Search engines need to be able to crawl your site effectively and the way that your website pages link together will influence the rankings that each page receives in a variety of subtle (and not so subtle!) ways.Because the way that a website is structured and designed can greatly influence the success of any SEO campaign, the best time to plan SEO work is during a website design or redesign.

Keyword Mapping

When you structure or re-structure your website for successful search engine optimisation, start by mapping the keyword phrases and search terms that you want to use onto pages within your website. (For assistance with choosing the right keyword phrases, consider our keyword research and keyword strategy services.) People use different terms and phrases in Google and the other search engines depending on where they are within their thought processes, their goals and how close they are to making a buying decision. By properly placing keywords within your website, we can help you to ensure that you deliver the best landing pages to people depending on their specific searches.

Think long-term

You’ve probably already spotted that many search engine results pages are dominated by the homepages of websites shown there. This is because a homepage usually has more links pointing to it. Some of our competitors will redesign their clients’ homepage to target very specific keyword phrases for which competition is poor. When they do this, it looks as though they are delivering “results” very quickly. However, these are short-term tactics that limit the potential of an SEO campaign and often actually have a negative impact on the overall performance of the website. SEO is a long-term strategy and your keyword strategy should evolve as should your website structure and the way that you map your keyword phrases to the content on your website because they depend upon which pages you use to target different search terms. You may well succeed in the short term by using your homepage to target very specific search terms, but you’ll lose out in the long-term.

Three phases of search

There are essentially three things that nearly everyone does before they decide to buy. They will:

* gather information
* compare alternatives
* decide where to buy

When you map your keyword phrases to the content of your website, take care to address these three phases by mapping your keyword phrases to the appropriate pages on your website. The objective is to bring people to the best pages on your site that matches their queries therefore allowing you to make the most of the traffic from the search engines. One thing that our clients often realise when we do this is that choosing the right keyword phrases is only half the battle. In order to make the most of every visitor that hits your website, you need to be able to control where they land and the message that they see when they do.

Crawlability and Site Navigation

There are two important aspects of your website that you need to focus on in the next phase: crawlability and site navigation. Both of these are equally important. Crawlability simply means how easy search engines find it easy to crawl and index. Ideally, all your website content should be easy to crawl. We work with your website to make all of the content as accessible as possible to both human visitors and search engines. This includes creating Google or XML and text-only sitemaps. Site navigation is about how accessible the rest of the website is from any single page within the site. Basically, no matter where somebody is on your website, you want to be able to guide them back into the route that you want them to take. So make sure that your site is easy to navigate and that, no matter where somebody lands, they are guided to the relevant sales and marketing pages on your website.