Designing the Site Structure From SEO Point of View

SEO or Service Engine Optimization is a complex process that requires careful implementation and should be an important part of every area of website development . Time and again SEO experts have harped on the importance of a well designed site from SEO point of view. And it definitely affects your results in the search engines if some hard thinking is done while designing the site.

Directory or File structure has to be such that when your website is indexed by the search engines, none of your important files are missed out. Always place your most important files at the first or second directory level because the search engines don't go beyond these two levels. At the maximum, they index 40 to 50 files alphabetically present at these two levels. Also the files and directories should have names using your keywords without the use of underscore.

Traffic bringing pages, or popularly called Entry Pages, in SEO must be carefully optimized and submitted. Not a single one of such pages is to be left out. It is always better to make the entry pages as independent and stand alone having all navigation links on them so that when users land on them, they are not confused about where they are, what and who you are. Since some search engines now have image searching facility, it will benefit your site if you name your images and PDFs after keywords.

Site Map is one page that search engines simply love because it has links to every single page of the website. So it becomes all the more important to submit both the index and the site map page. The site map should be simple and easily navigable without any graphics having some information about your company or services on the top before the links.

Link popularity is another factor to be taken care of while designing your website. How many links your site has got, what is the quality of your links, and how many times the users click on links to your site, how long the users remain your site, and how often they visit your site, are some questions that if worked out can affect your rankings a lot.

There are many pages on the site that do not interest the search engines at all, for example Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). In case of all such pages, use a robots exclusion file to stop them from getting indexed.

It is the visible text that is important for the search engines and not the META tags or ALT text that is not visible to the search engines. But including keyword phrases in the ALT tag helps. In fact you can also use logos, image maps, navigation components, pictures, flash work in the ALT tags. But stuffing keywords as ALT text in a clear gif is considered spamming by many search engines. So beware.

Don't forget that your target audience is not only the users but the search engines spiders and directory editors also. Thus you should aim to receive regular traffic from both the users as well as search engine spiders and directories.

http://www.segnant.com/