SEO Structural Basics
Building the right foundations
When webmasters start to look at search engine optimisation (SEO) for the first time, it is normally after they've created their website, they're not achieving the results they'd hope for. SEO is a relatively new topic, but it's so fundamental to the way online businesses work that there is a huge amount of content available online related to SEO is some way or another. It's very easy to get caught up in the minutae of advanced SEO without due care to the basics. This article will address those basics.
Bear in mind, the factors listed below influence the effectiveness of your webpages in a number of ways. Firstly, and most importantly, they can affect how important or relevant the search engines view your pages. Secondly, they will affect how people using the search engines will view the links to your page, and therefore how likely they'll be to click on your link when it appears in the results.
Page content
The number one factor affecting the ranking of your webpages will be the quality and originality of your content. Whether all of the following structural basics are correct or not, it is imperative that you have content that the search engines will want to index.
The <title> tag
The <title> tag offers a concise description of what the page is about and is the most important of the structural factors influencing the search ranking for your page. Your <title> tags should be accurate, descriptive and not too long. You should avoid default, structural titles such as "home page", "index" or "new page" as they provide little indication as to the content of the page.
Title tags should be unique for all pages on your site.
The "description" meta tag
Meta tags are pieces of HTML code that are hidden from the webpage viewer, but provide additional information for the search engines and other automated page readers (aka "bots", "crawlers" or "spiders").
The "description" meta tag is used to provide an expansion to the title tag and should be used for a fuller, more detailed description of the content of the web page. This can be from a couple of sentences to a full paragraph in length.
URL structure
The structure of URLs on your website will be dependent on a number of factors, including the type of site, and the language used to create the pages. A full explanation of the different ways for creating a webpage is beyond the scope of this article, but some basic rules should be observed:
- Create a hierarchical URL structure that aligns with the site navigation
- Include descriptive folder and file names to allow website visitors to quickly identify if a page might be relevant to them
- Use unique URLs for each page on the website - do not create multiple URLs for single pages. Bear in mind that some search engines are case-sensitive and can interpret the same querystring parameters ordered differently within the URL as different pages.
Other factors
There are many structural factors that can affect the performance of your website in the search engines. Once again, many of these factors boil down to improving the site for your visitors. Navigation, image <alt> tags, hierarchical heading tags, external links, XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, etc...all these factors and more can improve the performance of your website in the search engines. I'll be covering all of these, and more, in future articles.