Advantages of good site structure?
In this article I am going to be talking about the advantages, in terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), of having a good site structure. When developing a website whether it be a simple information website, an e-commerce website or whatever having a good site structure is vital. This may be for ease of use by visitors, search engine crawlers or even the web developer working on the website.
For a web developer developing the site, the site structure may mean the way in which he/she organises their files and maybe even their code. This could be anything from using classes, functions or even just where they put their files maybe in sub directories so they can understand which code is for what page. Organising your code is sometimes a tedious task if you have already written the code and are going back through it to revamp it. Or maybe you are taking over a project from a previous coder; this can be a daunting task as more often than not you will notice the previous coder may have a total different style of coding to yours. Sometimes this can even make it hard to understand what’s going on. If you take a look at a lot of high end scripts like vBulletin, IBP, or phpBB. All of these are forum scripts, all of them have different coding styles, and all of them organise their files pretty well so scripts can be easily imported during runtime or be easily found when editing.
When it comes to good site structure for visitors this could mean the difference between a frequent customer and just a quick view of the homepage. This is because most visitors don’t want to go through all the pages of your website to find what they are looking for. They want to be able to easily navigate around the site, weather this be with the use of a simple HTML sitemap, or whether you display your product categories and information headings in the navigation. For example if you go to near enough every e-commerce site you will notice they have navigation for all their categories, sub categories and so on. With this sort of site navigation customers can more than likely find what they are looking for quite easily.
When you get to the search engine optimisation stage of the website, a good site structure can be more important. This is because you want the search engine crawlers to find all of your pages and products. However the crawlers must be able to find links to them pages if you want it to index them and for them to be even considered by the crawlers. However using an XML sitemap will help with this, as you can reference this in your robots.txt which in turn will tell the search engine crawler to go through every link in the sitemap. This is useful when using an e-commerce website with a dynamic XML sitemap, as this will ensure the sitemap is automatically updated every time the search engine crawls through it. Having this sort of site structure will definitely help when it comes to the search engine rankings. It is even possible for your products themselves to be listed in the search results, this will allow customers to find the products even easier as when searching for items people are more than likely to enter that product into the search engine itself rather than searching for the category or even the website name. Having this on your website will give you a distinct advantage over your competition.
I hope this article will be found to be useful to anyone who reads it and encourages you to structure your sites well, both for optimisation and for the visitors themselves.
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