2. Site architecture
A good site architecture leads to a great user experience and yes, to a great “search-engine-experience” too. While this part gets technical super fast, there are many simple things that everyone can take care of to improve accessibility and SEO rankings. So, let’see some best practices:
2.1 Having more pages increases the visibility of the site to search engines.
2.2 Whenever you can, try to avoid sub-directories.
With each new level you are going to bury your content deeper and deeper. Deep pages may be crawled less frequently, so the flatter your structure is, the better. And try to use keywords in your folder and sub-folder names.
2.3 Keep your navigation simple.
The more menus and sub-menus you have, the harder to access it.
2.4 Every important page must be reachable from your homepage.
2.5 Make sure that the names of your URLs reflect your site’s structure.
If is possible try to avoid using dynamic URLs.
Don’t forget to customize the default URL structure of your website. By default, WordPress creates an "incomprehensible" URL structure, something like this:
If you stick with the same permalink, you could lose your search engine ranking and also affect your conversion rates. Instead, create a customized URL structure - for example post title - that can improve the visibility in front of both the search engines and web audience. Also, keep the URL structure simple, clean and readable if you want to boost your online visibility.
2.6 Create a naturally flowing hierarchy without complex navigational structures.
2.7 Search engine visibility is increased as the amount of page text increases.
The optimum page size is somewhere between 500 and 5,000 words.
2.8 Make sure that any prominent heading text throughout your website properly uses the h1 – h6 heading tags.
2.9 Don’t ever use Javascript to generate content or navigational elements!
The components of a webpage can be created either at the server (before being sent to a browser) or after arriving at the browser. In the latter case a browser requests a page and included in the page is a Javascript code which will be executed by the browser. If the Javascript code is used to create a content piece or a navigational element, those won’t be created until the browser reads the Javascript code. The search engine bots won’t read and execute the Javascript code, therefore when a search engine will request the given page from the server, the content and/or the navigational elements won’t be created!
These Javascript-based browser-side techniques basically will block search engines from accessing your pages. Similarly, the navigational elements created with Adobe Flash are also invisible for search engines (even at server side). If you really want to use these techniques, you’ll have to provide other ways for search engines to find their way through your website (for example, displaying regular text-links at the bottom of the page, a good sitemap, etc).
2.10 Avoid using frames to embed content from other sites.
These HTML frames basically are entire (separate) websites or pages which are embedded into your web page and they can be very confusing for search engines.
2.11 Use pagination …
And use pagination techniques carefully. If you have only a few pages and each subsequent page is visible (and clickable) in the pagination bar, than you shouldn’t face any indexing problems, but if you have too many pages and the pagination bar displays only a few initial and a few final pages, the in-between pages won’t be linked to from the main page, therefore they’ll be crawled less often by search engines.
In order to help search engines, you can link several pages together – and identify them as part of a larger set – by using the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link elements in thesection.
Let’s assume, that you have a long piece of content separated into 3 pages: yourdomain.com/page-1, yourdomain.com/page-2 and yourdomain.com/page-3. If you want to tell search engines that these 3 pages belong together, you’ll have to use the rel=”next ” and rel= ” prev ” attributes.
In the <head> section of the first page you’ll have to include the following line (between “<” and “>” brackets):
link rel=’next’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-2′ /
On the second page you’ll have to use both attributes:
link rel=’prev’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-1′ /
link rel=’next’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-3′ /
And finally, on the third page:
link rel=’prev’ href=’yourdomain.com/page-2′ /
Or you can use a handy pagination plugin like:
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