SEO-Friendly Website Structure

A website must not only have an appealing design for human users; it must be SEO-friendly so that it will be much easier to optimize for search engines. This search engine optimization process goes by as you create the website. Actually, this is supposed to be first done before the actual on-page optimization (Alt Attributes, Header Tags, Meta Tags). I just wasn’t able to make a good article about it. Anyway, lets proceed on how to make an SEO-friendly website.

There are different things to remember to make a website an SEO-friendly one. One of this is to maximize the usage of CSS (Cascading Sheet Style). CSS (Cascading Sheet Style) gives us the ability to abstract the design out of a webpage, or site into a secondary document. This gives us a lot of advantages ( very few disadvantages!) by removing redundant design code from your website you place the content closer to the start of the document; while reducing your code to markup ratio. It also makes it easier, and more cost effective to maintain your website as you can implement simple design changes by only editing on file. Comparing a table-based design website and a tableless design website, the code of the second one was 40% – 50% less than the code of the first one. With much shorter code, the file size of a webpage is getting smaller; making search engines able to index the website more efficiently.

Another thing to do is to have an SEO-friendly URLs for your website. There are two types of URLs: dynamic URL and static URL. Dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site’s database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database. The problem in using dynamic URLs is that search engines don’t like dynamic URLs because of a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =). Another disadvantage on dynamic URLs is that dynamic pages generally do not have any keywords in the URL. (we all know that is very important to have keyword rich URLs.) Highly relevant keywords should appear in the domain name or the page URL.

On the other hands, Static URLs are URLs that doesn’t change, and doesn’t have variable strings. Static URLs are typically ranked better in search engine results pages, and they are indexed more quickly than dynamic URLs, if dynamic URLs get indexed at all. Static URLs are also easier for the end-user to view and understand what the page is about. If a user sees a URL in a search engine query that matches the title and description, they are more likely to click on that URL than one that doesn’t make sense to them. Here is an example of a dynamic URL and static URL:

http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=8&view=basic (Dynamic URL)
http://www.domain.com/2009/10/01/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/ (Static URL)

Now, how to resolve the issue on dynamic URL? You need to do a URL Rewriting. I don’t have enough knowledge about this topic; since this more about programming. For you to understand what is URL Rewriting and how to do it, I provide a video discussing on how to create an SEO friendly URL using UrlRewrite Module in IIS7: