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Architecture

The architecture of a website can have a significant impact on your website’s SEO. Quite often, the architecture of a website is the most overlooked fault of a poorly optimized website. It should go without saying that if you want your website to be listed in search engines, they must be able to find your content. No, I am not talking about simply submitting sitemaps, which is a good idea, but does not eliminate the problem of poor architecture. Another thing to consider is how fast your website is. Did you know that search engines care about their users? They want lightning fast results for their users, including how long it takes for your page to load.

Crawlable Architecture

You might have already created a sitemap for your website a few days, months, or…. years back. Hopefully, you used a good sitemap generator to map out your website for the search engines. If not, why not create a sitemap at this very second? Did it find all of your pages? If it didn’t, you need to fix that asap because what good is a web page if no one can find it? Sure, maybe some sites link to that page, but think of all of that search traffic you are missing. Search engines love crawling, but make sure all of your pages are accessible through an HTML link. Note: don’t make stupid JavaScript onclick actions for navigation. They are ugly and depressing because they are not useful for people without JavaScript, which includes some search engines.

Faster Page Load Time = Better SEO

The equation is truly that simple. The faster your page loads, the better your SEO will be (up to a certain point, of course). Try using the Firefox extension ySlow and Chrome’s PageSpeed extension to test the speed of your page. Think about it from a user standpoint. Obviously, you would prefer those pages that are lightning fast where you can navigate from page to page taking in the content at a blazing fast rate. You might wonder what a good page speed is. Well, that depends on what content your page is providing. You should worry more about the optimizations recommended by those extensions.

Clean URLs

The new buzz of the web is all over clean urls. They simply just make sense from a search engine viewpoint and a user viewpoint. They are easier to read and easier to crawl. How ugly is a page that has something like www.example.com/index.php?category=SEO&tutorial=Architecture compared to something like I have now? It is much better than putting parameters like odd turtles at the end of the page name (I am going to fix mine in the near future, but I am too lazy at the moment). I just recently changed my urls to be clean urls, and I can tell you it is a great feeling. Clean urls also serve the benefit of being displayed neatly in the search results. Believe it or not, a user’s eyes scan across the url in the search results. It is just another chance for you to confirm what your website is about. Finally, those other websites that link to you are sometimes lazy and only post the actual url to your website. So, your clean url is your new advertisement to visit your page!



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If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content.

  • Stewart, Suzy. "Architecture". After Hours Programming. Accessed on March 18, 2024. https://www.afterhoursprogramming.com/tutorial/seo/architecture/.

  • Stewart, Suzy. "Architecture". After Hours Programming, https://www.afterhoursprogramming.com/tutorial/seo/architecture/. Accessed 18 March, 2024.

  • Stewart, Suzy. Architecture. After Hours Programming. Retrieved from https://www.afterhoursprogramming.com/tutorial/seo/architecture/.



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