Guide To How A Website Should Be Structured When It Comes To SEO

While not having SEO MAY NOT particularly hurt your business, you often miss many opportunities. For example, SEO boosts people’s awareness of your brand and further increases website traffic.

Another effect that is optimizing for search engines has is that it forces you to tidy up your website. This allows the website to be much more easily accessible and comfortable to be in. An example of a bad SEO Structure would be https://arngren.net. This website has information worldwide, and it would be hard to read the data. If you, however, would make this SEO friendly, then many of the items would be sectioned and categorized into other web pages more neatly.

How Website Optimization (SEO) works

To know how Website Optimization works, we must first see how the search engine works. Search engines don’t always work the same way, but they always have three primary SEO functions.

A critical function of a search engine is its ability to crawl websites. When a search engine crawls websites, it means finding new content using robots. Content can range from a lot of things. It can be a new webpage, a blog, a video, etc.

However, the robots will then index that content to draw from later. An index is a search engine database that gathers content to show.

The last important function of the search engine is its ranking of websites. The ranking serves to be a sort of measurement of how relevant a website is to the search content-wise. This means that if your website looks nice but does not have good content, it will not thrive. You may ask how the search engine can tell if the content is relevant, but we’ll get to that later.

How web developers can optimize your website to work with these functions can vary in many ways. From instructing the “crawlers” on scanning the content to having keywording for the search engine to understand the content. SEO itself is adapting your website to capitalize on these functions.

How Keywords work

Keywords may not sound important initially, but SEO can not work without them. Because of this, it is essential to understand them as they build this very practice.

Search engines are not as bright as people think, so they must rely on more straightforward methods. If you know how search engines work, search engines will not use the entire query. Searching its index with the whole question will cause it to miss some important content instead. Instead, search engines use keywords and key phrases to search their index and list relevant content.

Optimizing your website to the engine mainly means keywording your content correctly so the engine understands the content in your website. When the search engine roughly understands your website’s topic, it can rank it more accurately.

Utilizing keywords for yourself is not as simple as just inserting keywords related to your content. If you try to rely on simple keywords on your website, you will find that it won’t be effective. This is because there will already be lots of competition for it, like “shoes” or “whales.” Key phrases or long-tail keywords are good alternatives to using short keywords as they result in less competition.

You also tailor to audiences that are specifically interested in your content. Surprisingly, the drawbacks to doing this are minimal, as you might think people won’t be too specific. However, search engines autocomplete can often lead people to be unsure of what they’re looking for directly to you.

Javascript/Flash Usage

While having big pros, such as more animated and interactive websites, JavaScript has some serious cons. Website crawlers are often pretty good at what they do but are not intelligent. In the past, crawlers often had trouble with JavaScript content on websites. Since search engines like Google and Bing adjusted for these problems recently, they are not as impactful. However, there still can be issues causing the crawler to skip over JavaScript content.

The robots will usually not do anything intractable, so dependency means much-missed content. To adjust to these issues, you can do a few things. The first thing you should do is limit the number of user events on your website.

Flash tends to suffer many of the same problems as JavaScript, even in the past. If you want to use Flash on your website now, it’s not a good idea, as browsers are eliminating the flash player, and support will be limited by 2021

Website SEO Structure

To optimize your website, you can have a proper structure for your website. An appropriate website structure will make it easier for users to navigate and search engines to crawl.

If not for the more easy but essential thing, you can have a hierarchy for your website. A proper hierarchy is beneficial when creating the website, users, and search engines. When creating a hierarchy, you want each web page to link to other, more specific web pages. This lets users and search engines understand the website structure and makes it easy to navigate and search content.

Having a hierarchy is necessary not only for the website itself but also for the URLs. You want to make sure your URL matches your hierarchy because it also helps the search engine’s ability to crawl. However, when you click on a topic you want, it goes into much more detail.

Another thing people forget when optimizing their websites for search engines is to make their images SEO-friendly. Images can play a massive role in loading time and affect your search engine rankings. Loading times are a factor that search engines also take into factor when ranking a website. So make sure your images are the right size; around 30 to 100kb is recommended.

One way to know if your websites have a good structure is through site links. Site links are links that the search engine can use to display right below your link when it appears. If you search up Twitter, for example, below the link to the websites will be other links listed because site links aren’t programmed but are given means that search engines like your website structure are offered.

So, it’s generally a good idea to follow the structures of websites with said site links and, eventually, get one yourself.

Examples of Well-Structured Websites

I could tell you all about structuring your website, but it’s also essential to look at examples. One example of a well-structured website would be Scholar’s Edge. You can see that it is meant to let people choose the content right on the home page. This website also contains a proper hierarchy as well. Selecting a link will often lead to more in-depth content, like Features & Benefits.

Not only that, but its URL has a proper structure, like most websites should have. You can always tell what web pages you are in and how deep you are in the website currently. The last thing about the website is that it does not throw images everywhere. Its pictures aren’t too big in data size, and few are on each page.

Bad SEO practices

Sometimes good intentions can often lead to erroneous results. People do the opposite when optimizing websites for search engines, known as the “black hat SEO” or negative SEO. Understanding and taking steps to avoid them is important information and a way to protect your rankings.

One general bad practice with SEO is trying to take advantage of the system, for example, keyword stuffing. Keywords that I have mentioned before are a vital part of becoming SEO-friendly. Search engines scan your websites for keywords to inform the search engine relevant to the user’s search. However, there are consequences to abusing this by stuffing all kinds of keywords on your websites. Search engine robots can detect this abuse, even if it’s accidental, and end up lowering your rank instead.

Another bad SEO practice you must be careful with is having low-quality links on your website. You may not be aware of this, but other websites can still affect how your websites rank. Links to low-quality websites often bring down your website ranking, so check on the links you used on your website. It’s also important to check regularly, as competitors can and will take advantage of your links if needed.