Website Topology Tune-up and Maintenance

The real world of 2009 is very different from 2000. Webmasters and developers often had one key player back then that helped them create a logical site structure: the information architect. These roles existed in larger corporations when the large e-commerce sites we know and love today were under construction. However, the webmasters of today are expected to be Information Architect, Designer and Manager to create and run an organized, easily accessible and optimized site by themselves.

Typically, they have already developed a structure in their mind or sketched it out on a napkin during a lunch meeting. Seems unorganized but some of the structures remain in place today – but how effective are they for SEO and page ranking? Technology has evolved to be very out-of-the-box, but the extra help they may need is not available.

Get Informed

Watch Rand’s entertaining video about content categorization for large sites, such as blogs, news or enterprise sites. He provides some great examples and reasons for the model he selects.

Keep in mind that it is very easy to define site structure when starting a new site. Starting a fresh site is less complicated, everything is clear, organized and in just the right place where you’d like it to be. However, when your site gets a bit older, the content is growing in size and may be a little too haphazard. You add a page here and there. Some blog posts are moved to an archive section. You remove old pages, products. Content starts to get a little bit rushed and disorganized. The grand plans and structure you designed has now been lost along the way. When a year has passed – do you still know how your site is organized?

By the way, Bruce Clay refers to such technique as siloing. Siloing categorizes content on your site based on the theme. The theme and sub-topics are determined by target key phrases pulled from the content on your pages. Siloing categorizes the content both structurally and virtually, which means the content is categorized on the server (or at least how it appears to search engines), and virtually – it’s how contend is interlinked. Check out this article about siloing (a.k.a. page rank sculpting).

Link with Purpose

As you all know, search engine optimization is a lot about links. If you link much to a specific page, Google thinks that’s the most important page on your site. And yes, everybody links to their home page and top product categories, contact pages, and so on. Still – is this the right way for your site?

So – a site’s structure matters a lot. But keep in mind that page rank sculpting doesn’t work with the “nofollow” attribute anymore! However, you can achieve the same results with robots.txt, javascript links and the meta robots tag.

Definition: nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not be included in the link target’s ranking. It helps to reduce specific types of search engine spam.

Get Some Website Tune-up and Maintenance

Still, there is one question we didn’t answer: How do you maintain and follow your site’s structure when you have an established (grown up but messed up) site? Can you still draw it on your napkin? Don’t worry – because LinkAider will come to the rescue. With LinkAider, you can see your “most linked to” page with a single click. Also, you can manage and reorganize your your pages and links in any way you like.

Build your site’s structure wisely and if you haven’t subscribed yet, do it now. It’s free.

Tags: linking, Links, topology