Working With SEO

In order to create a successful search engine optimized (SEO) website, the designer must be sure that the website is well put together. In creating this website, the designer must first be sure that the website is appealing to the user and that the site is easily navigable. The way to create the proper architecture for a website is to be sure that the site is flat and has minimum user clicks to get to the destination page. “A great tip is to identify your most authoritative pages using the ‘Top Pages On Domain’ tool at SEOmoz and use those pages to add some authority to others by linking out to them” (Baxter, 2009).

In addition to creating the proper navigational structure of the website, the designer must also check for broken internal and external links. Some tools to use for finding broken links consist of “Xenu’s Link Sleuth” tool and “Web Link Validator” tool which will crawl through the website and recognize any broken links.

Another technique for helping with the architecture of a website is to check the server header response code and to also check the site for duplicate content. If either of these is wrong in their results, they should be corrected. While some of the concerns may need to be fixed by the sites developer, others can be fixed by simply changing some wording or taking the proper steps with the search engines to correct the information.

The final steps that the author explains in order to make sure that a website has the proper architecture is to be sure that the site has one main URL by setting up a canonical 301 redirect. In addition, also be sure to remove the developmental site that was used to originally create the website. By leaving the developmental website on its server, this creates duplicate content that can get crawled by search engines and create a negative impact on the website. Once the live site is up and running, the developmental site should be taken down.