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 brand awareness and further increases website traffic.

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

How Website Optimization (SEO) works

To know how Website Optimization works, we must first examine how search engines operate. 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 using robots to find new content. Content can range from many 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 as a measure of how relevant a website is to the search content-wise. This means that if your website looks nice but lacks good content, it will not thrive. You may wonder how the search engine determines if the content is relevant, but we’ll address that later.

How web developers can optimize your website to work with these functions can vary widely. From instructing the “crawlers” to scan the content to keywording the content for the search engine to understand it. SEO is the process of adapting your website to capitalize on these functions.

How Keywords work

Keywords may not seem important at first, but SEO cannot 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 understand how search engines work, you will know that they do not use the entire query. Searching its index with the full question will cause it to miss some vital content. Instead, search engines use keywords and key phrases to search their index and list relevant content.

Optimizing your website for the engine mainly means keywording your content correctly so the engine understands it. When the search engine roughly understands the topic of your website, 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 short keywords, as they attract less competition.

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

Javascript/Flash Usage

While having significant advantages, such as more animated and interactive websites, JavaScript has some notable drawbacks. Website crawlers are often pretty good at what they do, but are not intelligent. In the past, crawlers often struggled with JavaScript content on websites. Since search engines like Google and Bing have recently adjusted for these problems, they are less impactful. However, there may still be issues causing the crawler to skip 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 has often suffered from many of the same problems as JavaScript. 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. An appropriate website structure will make it easier for users to navigate and for search engines to crawl.

If not for the easier 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 making a hierarchy, you want each web page to link to other, more specific web pages. This enables users and search engines to understand the website’s structure, making it easier to navigate and search for content.

Having a hierarchy is necessary not only for the website itself but also for the URLs. You want to ensure your URL matches your hierarchy because it also enhances the search engine’s ability to crawl. However, when you click on a topic you wish to, 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 page load times and affect your search engine rankings. Loading times are a factor that search engines also consider when ranking a website. So make sure your images are the right size; around 30 to 100 KB 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 for Twitter, for example, below the link to the website, you will find other links listed because site links aren’t programmed but are given, which means that search engines like your website structure.

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. Selecting a link often leads to more in-depth content, such as Features & Benefits.

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

Bad SEO practices

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

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

Another bad SEO practice to be cautious of is having low-quality links on your website. You may not be aware of this, but other websites can still impact how your website ranks. Links to low-quality websites often bring down your website ranking, so check 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.