The architecture of one’s site for SEO purposes requires as little as some title tag tweaking, or an overhaul of its wired-in links.
The important bit about website architecture, as Vanessa Fox noted at SMX Advanced‘s session on Diagnosing Web Site Architecture Issues, comes from the focus of the site publisher.
That focus should start with the site’s accessibility. An accessible site is a discoverable one, and once people have the ability to find it, the site gains the opportunity for those valuable conversions. Check the search results for the site for starters, to see where chances for improvement exist.
Fox also plugged Jane and Robot, a new blog about usability and search engine optimization. As she is a contributor, we think the site will be worth a place in one’s feedreader.
Chris Silver Smith said that in his experience, 90 to 95 percent of SEO problems end up being very basic stuff to fix. Diagnosing crawling issues through the top two search sites, Google and Yahoo, may present something of a challenge.
Smith claimed that Yahoo tends to show everything it indexes, but Google may be filtering some of the pages a webmaster expects to see. (This sounds like the sort of problem Google wants webmasters to avoid encountering by signing up for its Webmaster Tools – David)
An easy web-based way for webmasters to get a glimpse of what the crawlers see exists at seebot.org. Seebot uses the venerable Lynx text browser to render a site. Crawlers don’t “see” Flash or Javascript, making a text-based browsing approach a valuable one for diagnosing crawl issues.
As a tip, Smith suggested using Google Sets to determine if one’s site is categorized appropriately, and to figure out competitors as the search engine sees them.
Jonathan Hochman shared some of his favorite Firefox browser add-ons to help with identifying possible site issues. He recommended NoScript, Googlebar, Live HTTP Headers, and Web Developer.
These tips and suggestions should put many webmasters on the path to finding and crushing the obstacles that lay between them and better search optimization. All there is to gain is greater traffic from the engines, and that has to be a good thing.
