Content, layout and page mapping
The internet is built up of links, without them no one would discover new websites and pages. If you think about the long string of links you clicked on to get to a certain website it can be quite daunting tracing it back. It sounds obvious, but making sure you have linked to all the web pages you have created is crucial and vitally important for the search engines to properly rank your site.
For a long time it was seen as important to have a site map page which simply detailed every page on a website, search engines used to value this for mapping out how a site should be listed.
However, today this isn’t as important but still a valuable thing to map out to see the overall structure of your website and how it all links together.
Planning this out early is a good idea, the search engines like content rich pages. Any pages with little to no content are not well favoured when it comes to page rankings. This really depends on what is being written, but as a good practice writing around a 155 word description of the pages content with appropriate keyword usage is advisable. The search engine crawlers read coding in the order it is written so the most important content should appear first. Specifically, always write body text prior to any embedded media such as a YouTube or Vimeo video.
Here are some best practices to consider when structuring your website:
- What content goes where?
- How should content be laid out?
- How should content be prioritized?
- Is it okay to use copied content?
- How do I map a website?
- Are there any special pages I should have?
Easy, work out what content you have and categorize that content under a page title. Ideally you don’t want any pages that take longer than 3 clicks from your front page, that is a simple rule to stick by to appease the search engines. Especially if your website is for a business you ought to have a page titled ‘about’ detailing what the website and business is all about, a ‘contact us’ page offering different contact channels with yourself or the company, finally bigger companies will want to consider a privacy policy, terms of service and disclaimer pages.
All these pages are considered to be pages used by responsible websites and companies, and not those of spammers and websites just aiming to route traffic elsewhere. Search engines like responsible companies who follow these best practices
Aside from making your site search engine friendly with these best practices, it is also beneficial to your visitors. Going to a poorly laid out website, as we all know, is very frustrating. Having to scroll past advertisements to get to content or close unwanted light boxes detracts from the overall experience. This is something that the search engines are very much aware of, they have algorithms that look at page layout and in the future it may have more of an impact that it does now, therefore getting into good design practices now is advisable.
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