How restructuring could save your site
A lot of websites fail to use their structure effectively for SEO. It’s just not one of the issues that tends to dominate. Site owners are so focused on the many other factors of SEO that they overlook one of their site’s major assets. This is a shame, because a bad site structure can put your entire search engine optimization plan in peril.
The restructuring of your site’s architecture is possibly the thing that will cause the most disturbance to your site, and it requires a lot of work. This is a reason many companies shy away from it. Site restructuring, however, is a basic search engine optimization technique.
A search engine optimization company will look at your site’s architecture if you pursue a site-wide optimization plan, and you can discuss this with us at www.seoconsult.co.uk. The reason behind this restructuring is usually because sites are created without link power in mind. Site restructuring for SEO involves creating logical paths through the site, which is of benefit to both site users and search engine spiders. It also involves the analysis of existing ranking power of certain pages and the strategic use of their ranking to support other pages.
It’s easier to understand the effects of bad site structure if some examples are reviewed.
Example 1: Misdirection and broad keyword use
Imagine that you are one of the millions of online retail sites around the net. You want to make sure that your customers can always find the page they want, so you provide links to everything from everywhere. In a basic example, your site might have a cuddly toys main page, and 50 cuddly toys product pages, all with roughly the same amount of content promoting your cuddly toys range. Each of these pages connects to the others with an equal number of links.
Because you want your site to rank for cuddly toys as a keyword, you might stick with cuddly toys as your keyword for all of these pages. As a result, the search engines aren’t being given any direction as to which page is the most important. Given a level playing field, the search engines are as apt to pick one of the cuddly toys product pages as they are to pick your main category page.
Example 2: Specific keyword use, link misdirection
Even if you do distinguish between the keywords for those pages, for example using ‘cuddly toys’ as your main category page keyword and then using ‘cuddly lion toy’, ‘cuddly elephant toy’ and so on for each of the product pages, the search engines are going to have a hard time figuring out which page is the important one. The keywords are similar enough that other factors are going to come into play. If the links don’t direct support to a main page, the search engines are still likely to choose one of your product pages.
Site structure is something you should consider carefully during your initial optimisation. Talk to your consultant about this issue.
