Page Structure

The Importance of Good Page Structure in Your Website

There is a lot of emphasis on the broad subjects of SEO and Conversion but one element which feeds and nourishes both of these is how the pages within your website and the website structure as whole look to search engines and human visitors alike.

There are for example several good reasons why using key phrases in your web pages names (URLs) is good practice such as:
It will help search engines to more easily crawl your web pages so they can be categorised and ranked in the most appropriate way.

Human visitors can more easily judge the content of the web page from seeing the URL e.g. in the search engine results.
Human visitors may more easily remember the URL.

Punctuation such as hyphens in page URLs makes them no less effective in terms of relevance as far as the search engines are concerned, but it can make page URLs easier for people to read and remember e.g. if it incorporates more than one word.

There are different types of complex URLs e.g. those that contain many different parameters and apparently meaningless characters. This can make things difficult for the search engine ‘bots’ e.g. the Google Bot (the software that visits and gathers information about your pages) by making many URLs that point to the same / same type of content within the same websites. As a result search engine bots may be unable to index all of your website which could have a negative impact on potential rankings, or the bots may consume large amounts of bandwidth trying to ‘make sense’ of the URL structure.

Google identifies ‘unnecessarily high numbers of URLs’ in a website as being the cause of many problems to the Google Bot. Creating this number of problematic URLs is often caused for example by:

Lots of different parameters and ways to sort the same items e.g. in shopping website, thus making lots of different URLs that search engines don’t need.
Lots of different Session IDs creating duplication.
Lots of irrelevant parameters in a URL e.g. long strings of numbers and other characters in URLs such as those associated with sorting parameters.
Dynamically generated calendars on websites which if not restricted can create links to limitless future and past dates.
Infinite spaces caused by broken relative links.
Filtering search features on websites which let users get different views of the same items.

Helping search engines to correctly crawl and make good sense of your content does then depend to an important extent on the URLs, their number, and type. Ways of avoiding some of the problems outlined above include for example:

Using cookies rather than session IDs. This could however have its own challenges after an EU ruling due to come into force at the end of May 2011.
Keeping URLs short (and meaningful), and avoiding too many parameters on the end.
Checking for and repairing broken links.
Using a robots.txt file to block Google’s access to URLs that are known to be potential problem areas e.g. the URLs that generate search results (dynamic), or as mentioned, calendar URLs.

Other Tips for a Better Website Structure

Creating a large number folders / directories within folders /directories when building your website may seem like a good idea from organisation point of view. In fact it can make for an overcomplicated structure where important pages are a long way from the root page. This kind of structure could create long, complicated URLs, and could have a negative impact on search engine results and conversion.

There are sometimes situations in a website where there are different URLs for the same content and people may make incoming links to either version. In theses situations it’s often best to either set up a 301 re-direct to the main version, or use a canonical URL or the rel=”canonical” link element to identify this main version. This not only makes it easier for search engines but also helps to ensure that all of the ‘importance’ and ‘reputation’ benefits of the incoming links aren’t split between pages.

Having memorable URLs is quite important and one way of helping to ensure this is to keep all the letters in the URL lower case, and to avoid having all of or just a few of the URLs in upper case.

Simple Navigation

User centred design is a feature of most good websites, and keeping the navigation aspects of your website simple for human visitors as well as search engines can bring big benefits. Navigation should flow well from the root page (home page), and for both humans and search engines it’s a good idea to have relevant text links to your most important pages form the home page. Search engines are likely to assume that links in the top part of your web pages are more important than links in the ‘footer’ area of your web pages.

Breadcrumb navigation links (often found at the top left hand side of web pages) are effective particularly in larger websites for making sure visitors know where they are, how they got there, and how they can get back.

Site Maps

Adding an HTML site map an XML Sitemap file to your website can make sure that your website can be more easily understood by human visitors and search engines. Human visitors can read the HTML site map whereas search engines can find out a variety of different information about your website from the XML version e.g. the pages, when the pages were last updated and how frequently they are updated.

XML Sitemap files can be understood by most major search engines due to a protocol which they all use. XML Sitemap files can now also be submitted to Google for many different aspects of your website including images, and videos.

Your web pages and your website structure, and how much thought you put into these therefore can make a huge difference to your Internet Marketing.