SEO Techniques for Website Navigation and Site Architecture

There are numerous SEO techniques that a website owner can employ in order to ensure that the website is ranked as highly as possible in the search results of the major search engines. Website navigation and site architecture are important concepts that should not be overlooked.

As an SEO, many hours are spent linkbuilding; a technique that involves trying to obtain external links from relevant and authoritative sites that point back to your site. Many people however, do not realise the effect that proper and effective internal site structure will have on their SEO efforts. Internal linking facilitating website navigation also contributes in showing what pages are about and which are most important.

Simple SEO Techniques: Improve Your Internal Site Architecture

Spending time optimising how you link internally will not only allow search engine spiders to gain a more accurate understanding of what your website is about, but it will also contribute to a better user experience. Follow these quick and easy search engine optimisation guidelines to improve your site architecture and navigation:

Keyword-rich anchor text: When linking between pages on your site, make sure that you use descriptive keywords as anchor text. This will allow you to “tell” the search engines what the page being linked to is about.

HTML Sitemap: Including a sitemap on your site will ensure that both users and search engine spiders are able to access all of your content on your site, especially the deep pages that might not have many links pointing to them.

Optimised Website Navigation: Make sure that you have a well constructed main navigation that links to the next most important pages, and that also allows users to navigate back to the main pages once they reach pages deeper within the site. This facilitates spider crawling and enhances user experience. It also allows older pages to be discovered as easily as the newer pages.

Indexable Navigation Bars: In your navigation, make sure that the text that links to other pages is able to be read and indexed by spiders. Do not use images that contain the navigation text as spiders are unable to read text that is within an image. Again, use keyword rich anchor text to link from navigation bars to other pages on the site.

Destination URL’s: Links within your site should be direct links, pointing to the exact page that it intends to direct a user to. If you have removed a page from your site for example, you may have placed a 301 redirect in place to redirect users to another relevant page. Ensuring that the link does not redirect, but points directly to the new destination page, will improve your internal site architecture.

Find Broken Links: Constantly check that your site does not contain broken links that might adversely affect your search engine rankings. Using a tool such as Linkchecker will allow you to easily identify broken links that can be easily fixed.

These SEO techniques can be implemented by you as the website owner, and they therefore serve as quick wins in optimising your website navigation and site architecture for search.

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