Site Structure and Google Indexation

Search engines are still one of the most important traffic drivers to sites and are the reason why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly important.

Every SEO specialist knows that effective site structure is absolutely vital to driving traffic to a website as your site’s structure determines whether a search engine understands the topic of your site and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site’s purpose.

One of the benefits of having good site structure is to use the quality content you’ve written to improve the searchability of your sales pages, which is important for any business.

When developing a new site or restructuring an old one, it’s important to break down your site structure and how the pages link through to one another. This can be achieved most easily by drawing out a spider diagram or chart – starting from your homepage – showing how the pages in your website connect to one another.

This is a very important step, because if a page on your website doesn’t link back to your homepage somehow, there’s a good chance that a search engine’s ‘spiders’ won’t be able to pick up on that content and it won’t be indexed on the search engine at all. Obviously this is very bad for business as having a product page that isn’t connected to any other page on your site means that your product won’t be appearing in search engines at all.

Search engine friendly design is one of the best practised aspects of SEO. Designing your site so that the visiting robot or spider can read and index all relevant aspects of each page of your site is essential to getting your pages indexed in search engines.

One of the best ways to improve your indexation is by optimising your meta keywords and description tags. These allow you to influence the keywords and description of your page in some of the search engines.

Unlike a lot of people believe, these aren’t the magic key to fantastic rankings in a search engine. Meta keywords and descriptions are mainly there to reinforce the purpose and intent of your webpage so that it becomes easier for a search engine to index your page for a relevant term. It’s also important that any keywords listed in these tags are directly related to the content on that particular Web page.

Having an understanding of your website structure will benefit your ability to perform effective SEO. As a result, you will have your pages ranking for the terms you want, rather than your website being left to the mercy of search engines.