It is a well known fact that SEO requires a website that is easy to navigate and has simple structure. SEO performance can be achieved only if we have the proper best practice in the industry. The correlation between web structure and SEO performance is a natural one and quite obvious. Web administrators should ensure that they provide the simplest and easiest path for bots to properly index their website thoroughly. A simple website navigation also ensure optimum user experience, because they can intuitively reach pages that they want. This will increase the possibility of long term search engine optimization success. Despite the ever changing search engine algorithm, this simple concept is always applicable and effective.
Search engine bots are highly automated and they will work well in a very efficient structure. We should make sure that each of your page is crawled properly. It doesn’t care for any visual enhancement that is only aimed to please human users. So, when designing a website, you need to think simple. You need to think like a search engine bot. It means that despite the rich visual enhancement, your website is essentially consisted of simple text with straightforward internal linking structure. It means that when you cut out all the bells and whistles, what’s left is simple page with plain text, which contains the core content and information for search engine bots to index. You need to remove common obstacles, such as submit button, drop down list and various JavaScript follow links. They are intuitive and usable for human visitors, but not for search engine bots.
When you have a long JavaScript code in your website, there’s no guarantee that the bot will be able to go through it to reach pages at the other end. The most sensible way is to offload any CSS and JavaScript code to separate files that can be accessed by any HTML files. This will improve the loading time and make your website structure much simple. You should also know that dynamically generated pages can stall your SEO effort if they prevent bots from indexing your website thoroughly. This is especially true if internal links often have URL that contain long query strings and with no clear reference to a HTML page. It means that some of your dynamic pages won’t be indexed at all, even if they contain your best content and information.
The depth of your website also determines whether it is easy to crawl and index. Your essential pages shouldn’t be more than one or two clicks away from the main page, while other pages shouldn’t be more than three or four clicks away. You can keep any page closer to your main page or popular landing pages using proper navigation linking structure in header, sidebar and footer. It may be a good idea to work with SEO professionals to further optimize your website structure. They may have an idea on how to further simplify your website to make it easier to crawl. Be open to suggestions and advices, as long as they can make your website better.
