Evaluating URL Structure

Along with smart internal linking, SEOs should make sure that the category hierarchy is reflected in URLs.


Take a look at the following good example of URL structure:

http://example.com/Games/Video_Games/History/



Now take a look at the following example of URL structure:

http:// example.com /title/tt0468569/

Unlike the first example, this URL does not reflect the information hierarchy of the website.



Action Checklist

When you are viewing a website from the 10-foot level, be sure to check for and note all of the following:

• Homepage links to every category of pages on the website
• The ability of category pages to help the user and the search engines
• The presence of links on category pages to all applicable
• subcategories (if the given amount of page link juice can sustain it)
• The ability of subcategory pages to help the user and the search engines
• The presence of links on subcategory pages to all applicable content pages
• The relevancy of the given content pages to the given topic
• The ability of the URL structure to match category hierarchy and supplement relevancy

Evaluating Subcategory Pages

If a website is very large it will need to break its categories into subcategories and link to them from the category pages. The subcategory pages should be set up exactly like category pages. The only difference is that instead of linking to more subcategory pages, they should link directly to content pages. Keep in mind that they have less link juice to pass than category pages (because they are more links away from the homepage), s o subcategory pages should contain as few links as possible. This is because the amount of link juice a link passes is determined by both the link popularity of the given page and the number of links it contains.

Similarly to category pages, subcategory pages should do the following:

• Be useful for the user
• Direct link juice to all applicable content pages
• Have enough unique content to be indexed by the search engines

Evaluating Content Pages

Content pages are the meat of websites. They are the reason visitors came to the site, and just like a good breakfast, these pages should leave those visitors feeling fulfilled and smelling of delicious bacon. (I made up that last part, but if a website really did smell like bacon, I would surely link to it.) The pages should be very specific to a given topic (usually a product or an object) and be hyper-relevant.

As an SEO you should be looking to see if the purpose of the page is directly stated in all of the following areas:

• Title tag
• URL
• Content of page
• Images

NOTE Good content pages act as link magnets. They are much more likely to receive links than subcategory and category pages. Smart SEOs use this as an advantage and have content pages link back to their applicable category and subcategory pages. This then increases the amount of juice flowing to all of the content pages on the website and makes them all rank better.

Good Example of a Content Page

The topic of the page is stated in the title tag (Super Mario World –Wikipeda, the free encyclopedia); the URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_World), the page’s content (Notice the page heading, “Super Mario World”); and again within the alt text of the images on the page.

An Ideal Content Page

An ideal content page should do all of the following:

• Be hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)
• Include subject in title tag
• Include subject in URL
• Include subject in image alt text
• Specify subject several times throughout text content
• Provide unique content about a given subject
• Link back to its category page
• Link back to its subcategory page
• Link back to its homepage (normally accomplished with an image
• link showing the website logo on the top left of a page)

Multiple Pathways to Content

Well-architected sites can get you to specific pages through multiple pathways. A good site gets you to deep URLs through a logical path with minimal clicks. A great site gets you to deep URLs through any one of several logical paths, and the paths frequently cross throughout the journey. The difference between good and great means more rapid, more thorough indexing; a more appropriate distribution of page authority and authority; and more qualified traffic.

Evaluating Category Pages

If the website has more than 150 pages, it should divide its content into categories and link to those from the homepage. Ideally, these pages should serve both as a landing page for a searcher and a link juice router for search engines. Many webmasters mistakenly focus on one

of these aspects while ignoring the other. As an SEO, part of your job will be making sure that both of these kinds of visitors are taken care of.

A website with more than 150 pages should divide its content into categories that are useful to both humans and search engines alike.

Evaluating Homepages

Ideally, the homepage should link to every single category of pages on a website. Normally, this is accomplished with a global navigation menu (global meaning it is on every web page on the domain). This is easy to do with small websites because if they have less than 150 pages, the homepage could directly link to all of them. (Note this is only a good idea if the homepage has enough links pointing at it to warrant this. Remember the little boy and the ant hill; link popularity is analogous to the amount of water the little boy has. If he doesn’t have enough, he can’t fill every chamber.) Following are some good and bad examples of this.

The Importance of Good Site Architecture

The problem is that the website lacks any kind of traditional site architecture. The link juice (ranking power) coming from the hundreds of thousands of domains that link to this company’s homepage has no way of traveling to the other webpages on this domain. All of the link juice is essentially bottled up at the front door.

Its content is located on at least 20 different domains, and there is no global navigation that leads users or search engines from the homepage down to categorized pages. The company’s online presence is more like a thousand islands rather than the super continent it could be. It is an enormous waste of resources and is directly affecting the company’s bottom line in a real way.

When explaining site architecture to clients, I start out by asking them to visualize a website like an ant hill. All of the chambers are like webpages and the tunnels are like internal links. I then have them imagine a little boy pouring water into the ant hill. He pours it down the main entrance and wants to have it fill all of the chambers. (As a side note, scientists actually have done this with cement to study the structure of ant metropolises. In one case, they had to pour 10 tons of liquid cement into an ant hill before it filled all of the chambers.) In this analogy the water represents the flow of link juice to webpages. As discussed earlier, this link juice (popularity) is essential for rankings.

The optimal structure for a website (or ant hill, if you must) would look similar to a pyramid

NOTE Homepages are almost always the most linked-to pages on a domain. This is because they are the most convenient (the shortest) URL to link to when referring to the website online.

Robots.txt

After analyzing the domain name, general design, and URL format, my colleagues and I look at potential client’s robots.txt and sitemap. This is helpful because it starts to give you an idea of how much (or little) the developers of the site cared about SEO. A robots.txt file is a very basic

step webmasters can take to work with search engines. The text file, which should be located in the root directory of the website (http://www.example.com/robots.txt), is based on an informal protocol that is used for telling search engines what directories and files they are allowed and disallowed from accessing. The inclusion of this file gives you a rough hint of whether or not the developers of the given site made SEO a priority.

Instead, I will tell you a cautionary tale. Bit.ly is a very popular URL shortening service. Due to its connections with Twitter.com, it is quickly becoming one of the most linked websites on the Web. One reason for this is its flexibility. It has a feature where users can pick their own URL. 

For example, when linking to my website I might choose http://bit.ly/SexyMustache. Unfortunately, Bit.ly forgot to block certain URLs, and someone was able to create a shortened URL for http://bit.ly/robots.txt. This opened up the possibility for that person to control how robots were allowed to crawl Bit.ly. Oops! This is a great example of why knowing even the basics of SEO is essential for web based business owners.

After taking a quick glance at the robots.txt file, SEO professionals tend to look at the default location for a sitemap. (http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). When I do this, I don’t spend a lot of time analyzing it (that comes later, if owners of that website become a client); instead, I skim through it to see if I can glean any information about the setup of the site. A lot of times, it will quickly show me if the website has information hierarchy issues. Specifically, I am looking for how the URLs relate to each other. A good example of information hierarchy would b e www.example.com/mammal/dogs/english-springer-spaniel.html, whereas a bad example would be www.example.com/node? type=6&kind=7. Notice on the bad example that the search engines can’t extract any semantic value from the URL. The sitemap can give you a quick idea of the URL formation of the website.

Don’t Fool Yourself, Looks Matter

Would you feel comfortable leaving your children with a person in a bright orange prison jumpsuit? Of course not! In the same way, visitors to websites are not going to feel comfortable if they are greeted with popups, loud music, and a multicolored skull logo.

Of course those are extreme examples. The common mistakes that I see are more along the line of the following:

• Lack of focus
• Crowded text
• Slow loading times
• Auto-playing music
• Unclear navigation
• Excess redirects

How Important Is a Domain Name?

From a marketing perspective, a domain name is the single most important element of a website. Unlike a brick-and-mortar company, websites don’t have visual cues closely associated with them. Whereas potential customers can use visual cues to identify if a physical building is more likely a barber shop or a bank, they are not able to tell the difference between domain names. All domain names use the exact same format: http:// subdomain dot (optional) root domain dot TLD. Take, for example, http://www.google.com or http://www.bing.com. To an outsider, there is no reason to think that any of these resources would be a search engine. They don’t contain the word search, and if their brands weren’t as strong as they are, their gibberish names wouldn’t mean anything to anyone.

This is where people get confused. They see websites like this and think that the domain name doesn’t matter. They register domains that are hard to pronounce or hard to spell and figure they don’t have to worry. The problem is they don’t realize that the popular websites got popular not because of their domain names, but rather despite their domain names. Google was such an outstanding product with a plan that was executed so well that it could have had been named BackRub and still been successful. (Note: It was originally called BackRub. I am just amusing myself.)

A nonsensical domain name can hurt a website, making it harder for people (and search engines) to find that site and associate with the concepts that the site focuses on.

For the vast majority of websites, a “search friendly” domain name is best. The search engines will always be constrained by the fact that many people search for exact URLs when they want to go to websites. Of course, the most relevant and popular result for the query “myspace.com”

would be www.myspace.com. You can use this to your advantage. Say your clients own a hotel in Jammu. For them, the best domain name would be www.Jammuhotel.com so that they could rank for the query Seattle Hotel.

But what if a killer domain name is not available? You are not alone. As of the time of writing all of the combinations for .com domains with three or fewer characters were already owned. If you can’t get seattlehotel.com, you will just need to be more creative. To limit your ability to hurt yourself by being “too creative,” I advise you to look out for the following when registering a domain name: 

• Avoid hyphens: In domain names, hyphens detract from credibility and act as a spam indicator.
• Avoid generic, uncommon top-level domains (TLDs): Like hyphens, TLDs such as .info, .cc, .ws, and .name are spam indicators.
• Avoid domain names longer than 15 characters: People are lazy; don’t try to make them type a novel just to access your website.

This advice about domains applies mostly to people who are either starting out from scratch, or for whom purchasing a better domain is an option. If you’re an SEO, you’ll probably have clients that are stuck with the domain they have, either due to branding or financial constraints. If that’s you, never fear. While a smartly chosen, keyword-rich domain is often an ideal situation, plenty of sites succeed without one.

how to create a seo friendly website

When professional SEOs first come to a website that they plan to work with, they view it through a very different lens than if they were just idly surfing. They instinctively start viewing it from the perspective of a search engine. The following are the elements that I pay the most attention to.

• How Important Is a Domain Name?
• Don't Fool Yourself, Looks Matter
• Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml
• The Importance of Good Site Architecture
• Evaluating Homepages
• Evaluating Category Pages
• Multiple Pathways to Content
• Evaluating Subcategory Pages
• Evaluating URL Structure