Basics of Building Search Engine Friendly Website Architecture
Monday, June 29, 2009 7:24
Search engine optimization is the sharpest-edged and highest-end tool to promote the ranking of websites in search engine result pages. Successful implementation of this website promotion tool depends on three fundamental factors – content, links and site architecture. Optimized content and quality inbound links from top-of-the-range websites are sometimes not enough to help you achieve the desired rank for your website if there is any flaw in the site’s architecture. Some of my blogs have put flesh on the basics of content optimization and link marketing. Here are some tips on how to build search engine friendly website architecture.
Using descriptive file and directory names is one of the keys to building a site’s structure. The descriptive name of a file represents its content to help search engines locate the website at one go. The insertion of keywords in the text of file and directory names reflects the relevance of the content to what visitors search for in search engines. Replace underscores with hyphens in the text of file and directory names to help the search engine web crawler crawl your site easily. 
Keep the size of each webpage file of your website under 150 KB. It is difficult for the search engine bot to crawl the page that exceeds the limit. Search engine robots do not crawl every nook and corner of websites if the websites are not among the top ten in search engine result pages. The crawler does not probe to the bottom of the deep directory structure of websites. Therefore, the site architecture with a shallow directory is easily explorable. The web pages with Java Script and CSS code in the content are too long to be crawled by the search engine robot. You can reap some extra advantages from the removal of JavaScript and CSS code from the pages to the external files. Maintenance of the code becomes simple through externalization of the content.
Using a 301 redirect for the pages that are permanently moved is a consideration for search engine optimized site architecture. A 301 gives search engines an index to the move of the page to a new location and the originality of the page. While crawling the old page location, the robot will be led to the new location of the page. It saves the loss of previously earned page ranking “link juice”. Avoid using JavaScript or meta refresh tags as page redirects as they are not of much use for search engine optimization of websites.
Take into account these factors of site architecture while having your website build and designed. It is no doubt beneficial in the field of search engine optimization.
