Having a successful and working website is detrimental to your online business portfolio. A well functioning site with all the necessary features for you to stand out from the rest will enable you to hit those sales targets.
One of the major pillars of any online portal is its ability to withstand and cruise through organic search. If your webpage isn’t able to appear on Internet searches which have been made by your target audiences, then you aren’t actually reaching the people who you want as your customers and prospective clients.
Fixing your website’s search engine optimization or SEO should be a paramount need as it helps you reach your desired client base better. One of the first things you must address while building your website is to examine how good your SEO is.
Figuring out your SEO will allow you to assess where your website needs the most work. You will get to know whether you need structural changes to your website or alterations in content strategy. Overall, SEO plays a vital role in developing your site’s architecture.
Here in this article, we look at six ways in which you can create an SEO-friendly website architecture.
Set your site hierarchy
It is just like constructing a home. You cannot suddenly decide to finish up a task on the foundation of the house while working on the first and second floors. Therefore, it is important that you organize your website beforehand rather than researching on the structure later in the course.
For this, you need to set the hierarchy of the portal. This would require prioritizing certain sections and topic pages. For example, if you have a news website then it will be suitable for you to showcase the top headlines on top of the homepage and content from the previous week lower down on the section pages.
Start by reviewing your site’s USP that brings the reader to your page and in-turn leads to increased sales. To formulate a site hierarchy is like a pyramid with things flowing from top to bottom and as soon as you’ve set that right, you’ll be on your way to make a solid structure for your website’s architecture.
Use SEO-friendly URL
Not only does Google prefer simpler URLs, but gaining good exposure and quality traffic are other benefits of owning a straightforward URL. Getting to see familiar words in search engine results leads to faster decision making on the part of the user and therefore you must use relatable phrases and words in your link.
For example, a link like “ https://mangomattermedia.com/web-hosting-singapore/ “ will make more sense than a link like “https://mangomattermedia.com/subcategory/image234523“.
Things that you have to keep in mind while finalizing a URL are – using lower case words with alphanumeric characters, using hyphens to join words, keeping URLs short to not more than 128 characters, using logical folders for categories and sub section pages, etc.
Check the flow of pages from one to another
You must check how the anchor text is being used since that is the piece of content on your page that links to other pages. These words are important as they indicate to search engine crawlers as well as humans what kind of content is there at the other end of the link. Plus, how pages are linked to each other tell a lot about your website. If pages on your portal are linked to all the pages, then it stands to have a good chance of being ranked higher on the search results page. Every page of the website must be reached in not more than 4-5 clicks.
Ensure a secure user experience
User experience has become an important factor in Google’s ranking of your website ever since it announced a more advanced way of rating a particular site starting 2021. Search engine check the following parameters while examining your website:
- Mobile Friendliness – You must ensure that your site shows up properly on screens of all shapes and sizes. Plus, whether or not you’re able to smoothly go from one link to another on different devices.
- Speed – Try and reduce the time taken for your website to load. You must check with your web host provider whether the servers can load higher data at greater speeds for a faster and smoother user experience. Talking of a web host, choosing that for your website to park can be quite a task but portals like MangoMatter Media helps you in that decision by giving you all the options based on your location, speeds and need.
- Security — Are you using https protocol and have all the necessary security certificates to ward off potential breaches.
Use a sitemap
Search engine bots prefer a website which helps the user find the exact thing he or she is looking for. One of the ways you can ensure that for your website is to have a sitemap that can easily direct the user to the thing he’s searching for.
Create header and footer
All good websites will have a prominent header that will depict all the necessary content pages that you had thought of during the planning stage. A header on your website’s homepage is a tool that is required for keeping a smooth interface where all the major tasks of the site can be completed. The purpose of a well-defined header and footer is to make the site navigation a simpler task for the user. See that your index headers properly so that the Web search crawlers can pick out that section page from the header and place it in front of the end user.
These checks will ensure that you have an SEO-active site which is now ready to gather the benefits of organic search on the Internet.
