Site Structure & Link Text

Introduction:
Developing the structure of your website is a very important step in its overall optimization. The site structure will dictate how the spiders read your site, what information they gather, what content holds the most weight, how much useless code they must weed through and more. You must structure your website to appeal to the visitor and the spiders.

There are four main points to be kept in mind while structuring a web site:

• Improving the user experience is your first goal, because this leads to higher conversion rates, happy customers, etc. If there is a comparison between creating a good user experience and an SEO objective, then site visitors will surely be of a great importance..

• Improving the “crawlability” of the site and channeling “link juice” (PageRank at Google, other search engines have their own formulas) into the most important pages – the ones that you’re trying to get ranked in search results. The method we use for this is called dynamic linking.

• Increasing the ranking of individual web pages within the site, and “broadening the profile” of our most important pages. By using the “anchor text” of our own internal links, and adding the right links in strategic places, we can boost our own search engine rankings.

• Getting more pages into the search engines’ index, also known as “index penetration.” Every additional page that gets indexed adds to our ability to improve our rankings, and in fact makes it easier to increase index penetration.

When developing your website you want to be sure not to create useless code that can confuse spiders and take away from the content of your site. When developing a site many people make the graphical layout with photoshop, create slices for the push-buttons and then they generate HTML. This is a mistake, you should maximize the use of HTML & minimize the use of above things and for that, Dreamweaver is a great option. The objective here is to keep the code as clean as possible! Remember the more code you have the more the spiders must weed through to get to your content, where you want them to be. A great way to cut down on extra code as well is to use style sheets. You can use style sheets in ways as simple as defining fonts or as advanced as creating tableless designs. There are many ways to use style sheets and the biggest perk to using them is to cut back on the code on any given individual page.