Map out your pagerank!
If you have built out a website, by this point you are a bit familiar with the site map. Creating site structure for your website goes beyond grouping like topics. By creating intuitive navigation and properly grouping like pages we can control the site’s overall function; ergo, increasing its conversion rate.
There are tons of tips and tricks to increase what’s called your “search viability,” or how visible text on your website is to search engines. Often times, pages deep in your site structure don’t get indexed as frequently, causing them to be hidden to Google or, at least, devalued.
These web parlor tricks do work sometimes; however, if you’re simply using these tricks as patch jobs to a site structure which was simply mashed together, you will never reap the full benefit of these methods, and you run the risk of a minor change to search algorithms throwing your site into index oblivion.
In his blog post on Site structure for SEO, Carlos Rio outlines the various methods of creating your site map for SEO. I recommend you take a quick jaunt over to his site and see what he has outlined. Any of these site structures can work decently; however, in my experience there are two that seem to index the best.
Flat Architecture
By using an All In/All Out method of linking from your homepage, you have every page one link away from your home page — presumably the strongest page on your site. This means that with each pass of the website, Google is more likely to index all of your other pages. Keep in mind that, as Carlos mentioned in his outline, this only works in really small websites because as you accumulate too many links on your homepage, it starts to look spammy. Might I also mention it looks horrible to your users. This is why the second method is my technique of choice when working on larger sites.
Book Architecture
This is the best of both worlds where SEO site structure meets usability. By using an All In/Some Out method on your homepage and All In/All Out on your site map, you can create an easily referenced site map (see Apple’s site map as an example). Also, you have the same individual page strength that you would have in a Silo setup (another method outlined by Carlos). Using this method of site setup combined with good cross-linking you can really create some good keyword flow within you site.
Remember that, although a website should never become un-usable, you need to keep search engine indexing in the forefront of your mentality during development stages. After all, what good is your site and the content on it, if no one can find it?
3 comments so far.
Ikea white boards. Very nice. We should draw some interfaces in the midst of all of that as to not lose the focus of what websites are all about.
Which one do I have? I have another question for you? I went to this marketing meeting the other day and I was told about ways to look up key words that are being searched. Overture, was one of them, I want to know what my target market is searching on google. Can I look that up? I went to overture and it is a pay per click kind of thing. Eventually that may be what I do, but first, I need to know what keywords I need. How can I research that?
Hi Priscilla.
As far as finding out what terms your competitors are using, your best bet is to go to there websites and pay attention to the verbiage they use.
More importantly than that you should think of “what are my users searching with”