With Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Functionalities Built Right In, Website Development Can Save Time & Money
It is clear that the architecture of a website has extremely beneficial functions such as increasing traffic and generating leads. Although the focus of website development is to obviously achieve those goals, there are a few things to remember when developing a website in terms of overall design. It is important to not only think of SEO factors, but also make sure the site is flat and very user friendly. It means absolutely nothing if a website looks nice or has built in SEO functions if the targeted user can’t find the product or service they are looking for. If findability and usability functions fail, the increased traffic of a well-maintained and well-built site won’t matter.
First, It is important to have a very flat and navigable site. It is crucial that a user and the search engines be able to easily reach the bottom of a website without being too difficult. It is also important to understand that the number of links on a specific page has an impact on the success of the website. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. That’s why it is so important during the website development process to be user friendly while also building a site that has functionality and SEO purposes. It is helpful to have internal links and cross-links between products; it helps by spreading the authority to all pages within a website.
It is also important to identify any broken links or server header responses. Although this is not extremely hard to do, Identifying broken internal links is pretty easy, it is often overlooked and neglected. By performing routine tests and scenarios, it can assure a websites integrity and continued functionality. If a broken link does happen or a server problem occurs, Giving the right messages when your page loads fully, is broken or if there’s a server problem is a vital part of the way your website communicates with search engine crawlers. By neglecting these occurrences, it leads to degrading the ultimate goal of any website.
Keyword rich content is always extremely important during the website development process but if it becomes duplicated due to numerous site links leading to the same URL, the overall strength of the website becomes diluted. Mentioned on search engine land by Vanessa Fox, “Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page.” This tends to hurt the overall success of a site because less of the site may be crawled by the search engines and/or the individual page may not get credit for all the links that are currently associated with that page. On the other hand, orphaning a page creates its own issues which results in indexed pages changing or taking authority away from the important pages of a website. By not linking to internal pages it creates problems for the ranking position of a specific URL. When changes are made to a site there should always be a thorough check of all internal links to make sure no one page is being neglected.
Finally, making sure a website is fully indexed in the proper manner is essential to providing a highly visited and SEO friendly site. If unwanted page URL’s do become indexed, which should be avoided if possible, there are ways of removing them from the search engines index. Overall, if the right steps are taken to insure that a website is fully functioning with proper structure, it will help the marketing objective. Ongoing testing along with a proper linking strategy and up to date content and code will prevent problems during the basic architecture of the website development stages.
