Site Structure Analysis

Site Structure Analysis

It is important that when a website is being developed to keep SEO in mind and ensure the directory structure is created in a clear and concise manner. By having a website developed in a horizontal directory structure that is broken out by theme speaks more truly to search engines and site users. The structural method is also relevant in producing the website navigational system. This reduces the overall “steps” into accessing website content as opposed to a deep vertical file architecture, which results in a very long URL string.

Site structure analysis is considered as the first and primary step which is normally called as website optimization. Site Analysis is one of the most important steps in optimizing a site. You will get to know about how you are judged by the search engines and the errors present on your site. This analysis is mainly done to make your site accessible and to improve the rank and nature of your site rather than reconstructing your website.

With Site structure analysis, review the most important elements  of the website. These include:

• Number of pages indexed
• URL Structure
• HTML/Code Structure
• Content Usage
• Meta Information Usage
• Sitemap / Internal Linking
• Human Usability

Ensuring that your site architecture is accessible to search engines, logical for human users and easy to update and upgrade are keys part of your search engine optimization efforts.

 

This analysis addresses the best practices to improve your sites visibility on search engines, which includes step-by-step keyword optimization, category and tag cloud creation, and PR techniques to increase inbound links and improve the rankings. Web page optimization makes your content to maximize the display speed. Fast display is the most important key for the success of a website. Due to this your profits increase, costs get reduced and improves customer satisfaction. Optimization transforms your pages to display navigable content faster, and to defer or delay off-site content.

The following steps are very important while analyzing a site:

• Date of Construction
• 404 Pages
• PR Structure
• Internal Links
• External Links
• Eliminating obstacles occurred in Search Engines

To maximize the display speed of your site, you can employ the following techniques:

• Minimizing HTTP requests
• Optimizing and resizing images
• Converting JavaScript behavior to CSS
• Using server-side sniffing
• Optimizing JavaScript for execution speed and file size
• Converting table layout to CSS layout
• Replacing inline style with CSS rules
• Minimizing display time while starting
• Loading JavaScript correctly

The navigational elements for the website should be reflective of the directory structure in which the site is assembled. This ensures that the website navigation is set up in an organized fashion relative to the document placement within the directory structure. Having a website navigation designed and structured in this manner increases the ease of access for the visitors of your website to reach desired information. By keeping access to information easy for website visitors works bilaterally in terms of search engine bots reaching content and indexing your website for search engine result positioning (SERP). 

Specialist needs to look for:
          i. Dynamic URL solutions for:
              1. Shopping cart systems
              2. Content management systems
          ii. Coding Issues:
              1. Suggest W3C compliant HTML code
              2. Comment out JavaScript and use remote .js files
              3. Use remote cascading style sheet .css files
              4. Eliminate client side JavaScript and Meta 302 redirects where not appropriate
              5. Substitute navigational links written in JavaScript with a static solution or at least a suggestion
              6. Keep page file size as small as possible (<100K)
              7. Avoid frames, Iframes and Whole Flash front pages
          iii.Architecture Issues:
              1. Resolve canonical issues:
                  a. Ensure only one domain serves content and that all other owned domains 301 redirect to main domain
                  b. Ensure that [site.com] 301 redirects to [www.site.com]
              2. Use of a site wide navigational system that ties the major areas together, consistently
              3. Use of a footer
              4. Use of a sitemap
              5. Cross linking of similar or related pages/categories
              6. Use of keyword text in links

Website Optimization combines the disciplines of both online marketing and site performance which is necessary to attain a competitive advantage. Reducing the download footprint and improving the reliability will work synergistically with those marketing methods to improve the total effectiveness of your site.