Archive for the ‘Architecture’ Category

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For those of you who enjoyed my series of posts on The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! I have (finally) compiled everything into one easy to download, save, print, and pass around PDF checklist.

The information here has been updated to include not only the check points but also the explanations of each, so you don’t have to keep referring back to the blog posts above. I’ve also added a few points here and there, but no major overhaul or anything.

Anyway, here you go: The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, PDF!

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Website architecture is one of the most important aspects of creating a search engine friendly website. Below are just a few questions I was asked recently on the topic of navigation, site structure, site maps and pages site.

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This is a continuation of a series of website marketing checklists. Check out all Web Marketing Checklists in this series.

What this is about: This list covers several elements regarding the architectural aspects of a website that focus on building a more search engine friendly site overall.

Why this is important: Website architecture can make or break the performance of a website in the search engines. Poor architectural implementation can create numerous stumbling blocks, if not outright roadblocks, to the search engines as they attempt to crawl your website. On the other hand, a well-implemented foundation can assist both visitors and search engines as they navigate through your website, therefore increasing your site’s overall performance.

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When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

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Yesterday I discussed code bloat by looking at how we can move style sheets and JavaScripts off the page in order to clean the coding up quite a bit. I this third post about cleaning up bloated code I wanted to address Tables and other typical causes of bloated HTML.

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Here is another round of questions submitted to me during a Website Architecture webinar I gave a couple months back. I wasn’t able to answer most of these questions before or during the presentation so I’ve been answering them in this Q&A series. You can check out Parts one, two, three, four, five , six and seven. This post covers questions regarding session IDs, repetitive vs. duplicate content, robots.txt files, navigation text, and maintaining link juice after a site re-design. Let’s get to it.
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I’m continuing to work my way through questions submitted during a webinar I gave on Website Architecture. You can check out Parts one, two, three, four, five and six. This post covers questions on URLs, breadcrumb navigation, CMS, Database driven sites, 301 and 302 redirects, navigation, heading tags, broken links and HTML theft.

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When performing a site architectural review, one of the first things I look at is the site’s main navigation elements. This includes top, side and footer navigation. Together, they all play an important role in both the ability of the search engines to properly spider your website, as well as allowing your visitors to find important areas and information quickly and efficiently.

Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn’t just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.

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The general purpose of having a custom 404-error page is to keep your visitors on your site if they find themselves having clicked on a broken link. Why go through the trouble to create the customize page if it doesn’t even fulfill this basic purpose?

I recently ran across a custom 404 page that did everything but what it should.

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Many years ago I put my site through a re-design. I worked hard to make sure everything was done just right, including the images and navigation. But one thing I failed to consider was internal linking, separate from the navigational elements. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much traffic I was losing because my internal linking was (or lack thereof) wasn’t benefiting my visitors.

In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn’t. While your site’s primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn’t make that the only way for visitors to get around your website. Click here to keep learning