Importance Of Search Engine Friendly Website Structure

Search engines encounter two kinds of obstacles:

• Technical challenges that prevent the search engine spider from

accessing content.

• A competitive marketing environment where everyone wants to rank

highly.

To ensure search engines can access your content, you must remove technical

barriers. Those who wish to achieve the best results must follow best practices.

These best practices are outlined in the chapter on Web Development and

Design.

The key is to make sure that there are direct, HTML links to each page you want

the search engines to index. The most important pages should be accessible

directly from the home page of your website.

Thus, the information architecture, or how content is planned and laid out,

has important usability and SEO implications. Users want to find what they

are looking for quickly and easily, while website owners want search engine

spiders to be able to access and index all applicable pages.

There are times when user experience and SEO can be at odds with each other,

but usually if you focus on building usable, accessible websites, you have made

the search engine friendly as well.

Another technical challenge to search engines is Flash. For the most part,

search engines struggle to crawl and index Flash sites. There are some

workarounds, but the best approach from an SEO perspective is to avoid

building sites or delivering key content in Flash.

The chapter on web development and design delves more deeply into building

a search engine friendly website.