4. An Ode to Structurally Sound Web Sites

The homepage of your web site may be the doorway to your online business, but the structure of the site behind the door is just as important as its curb appeal. An intelligent structure to the subsections of web site is the cornerstone of search engine optimization. To implement the right optimization process, you should follow these guidelines: First, define the right linking structure and hierarchy for your site. It is great to have a site filled with great information, but that information has to organized into If you have several categories, well structured with different content areas, be sure to link the top-level categories in the navigation on your Home page. The entry page of your site is the most important not only for the visitors; it is of great value to the spiders and thus needs to present all the linking requirements carefully completed. Secondly, you need to adapt the site code to be easily read.

Navigating Charted Waters
It does not matter how much great information your web site contains if it is impossible for visitors, and visiting spiders, to find it. Navigation is your greatest tool to helping everyone find the pots of intellectual gold hidden beyond your homepage. Your visitors are like treasure seekers in your site-island. Make their journey easy and entertaining for making them come again. What you can actually do? In the menu navigation you can set all the links to your major inner content - category groups, services, features, content groups, forums and promotions. When you choose which links to put in the navigation bar, you need to have a clear vision of your site structure. A well-organized home page is good both for your user retention and for the search engine spidering. Talking about the navigation links, we can consider the importance of the top line path navigation. This thing is the way you to lead the spider and the visitors into your content, allowing an easy follow-up of the site structure. Remember that every page of your site needs to have an easy access both from and to the home page. This can be achieved either by linking your logo to point the Home page or setting a Home link in the top of the page.

Outbound Linking
While linking, always consider the importance of the links outbound and inbound links on/into your home page. Many experts recommend that you find up to 10 sites in your industry with good Alexa.com positioning and Google PageRank and exchange links. Some webmasters will even buy links on especially popular home pages. The outbound links may be as important as inbound links. Search engines sort the sites by similarity and the outbound links can be a great help. For example if you set a link to http://www.my-favorite-competitor-site.com, the search engine spider may relate your sites as content of similar category. You can read more about Google PageRank and Alexa.com to find out why these are important for your search engine optimization and how the Alexa.com toolbar function as a mediator in the Internet.

Tables
Using a table-structured layout can make your content easy to find understand. The use of tables on a web page allows you complete control over the look and format of a page. Tables are especially useful in creating clear navigation sections, a great way to help users intuitively find the core logic of your site organization. Tables are also well accepted by Google for their ability to put organization in the content. You will see later in this tutorial how you can use tables to improve your search engine visibility.

To be most effective, the table structure of your site needs to be especially clean and well-organized. Arranging your content in tables will allow the spiders to find the logic of your content organization. How it can happen? When your table structure follows the content logic, your content will be spidered and classified better. If you have for example text descriptions for every product, you can set in the table name the name of the product or the name of the category group. Use equal table names and structures for your equal content units. Here is a code example of a beginning of a well structured table:

<table summary="Table Name">
  <tbody>
   <tr>
  <th class="classname">Title name</th>

Demystifying URLs
Dynamic web sites, managed by complex Content Management Systems (CMS), offer the webmaster greater flexibility and efficiency over hand-coded HTML. The use of a database allows your data to be easily stored, processed, and output. A database-driven system also your content units to be easy delivered for displaying using many search criteria and in multiple formats. Showing the searched information every time the user performs selects to request it , will allow your site to gain more popularity and to increase the user retention indicators.

The URL structure concerns the most important part of the optimization process. If your URL type is
http://www.yoursite.com/content.php?id=43
you can make it more readable by mode_rewrite.
This way your URL will read:
http://www.yoursite.com/2005/0112content.html

The automatic URL rewriting is one of the very cool new methods you can use to prepare your pages for an easy indexing. Go to our URL part to learn more.

Frames
Frames are considered not to be search engine friendly. Using frames you will cut your site from creating of different page addresses. Since the number of pages is counted for the site value and relevancy in the SERPs, you need to create as many pages as you can. Using Non-framed site will facilitate your users as well when they use Add to favorites or copy your URL to specific page, since in the framed sites all the pages adopt the home page address.