Website architecture is the approach used to design and plan a website to meet both business and user needs.
Developing good site structure enhances your chance of higher rankings in search engines. A search engine’s algorithm is complex and based on hundreds of factors, mainly focusing user experience. The way a user interacts with your site provides search engines with data they need to help determine how to rank your site.
In this article, we’ll cover several important factors and decisions that website owners need to make that are crucial to deploying an SEO-friendly site structure.
Dynamic URLS are URLs that contain dynamic characters like “?”, “_” and parameters are not user-friendly because they are not descriptive and are harder to memorize.
A Session ID is a unique number that is assigned to a specific user for the duration of that user’s visit (session).
The easiest way to develop your site hierarchy is to make a list of categories and subcategories, then create topics and actions your users will perform under those subjects. For more information about site architecture, take a look at our article on the How to Get Your Website to Speak to the Right Audience.
By making good technological and structural decisions, you’re building a better and more functional website for your users. When you focus on a user’s experience, not only will enhance your chance of ranking higher in search engines, you’ll also increase user engagement leading to higher conversion rates.
Your host file is typically located within c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. If you don’t see it there, other possibilities are as follows:
Best practices would suggest you to backup any file before you make any edits, whether that’s a WordPress plugin, core or theme file. Here’s the naming convention that I recommend: name_file_yyyymmdd. Here’s an example id I were to do this backup today: host_file_20171109.
Follow these steps:
Now that the backup is complete, navigate back to the location of the original host file. Since host files are not in a standard .txt file format, we will need to select the program we would like to open the file with. I suggest using Notepad since the program is installed with the Windows operating system and it’s easy to use. Right-click on the host file and selecting Open With from the right-click menu. From the right-click menu, select Notepad.
Within your hosts file, you should see something like the following:
Below the last # symbol, enter the IP Address of the development or testing server. You should enter two lines, one for the www version and another for the non-www version.
You’ve spent tons of time working on your website and online presence in order to improve your ranking and drive more traffic to your website. But one day you wake up to find your ranking has dropped. What do you do now? Do you have to start all over again?
Don’t panic! A stumble in the rankings happens to everyone, and it can be caused by a variety of factors. Google’s algorithm is always changing, which means what worked for your website six months ago may not work so well now. Your rankings may even return to normal the very next day.
But if it’s been a few days—or if you just want to be sure nothing else is wrong—check out these reasons why your ranking may have dropped.
One of the most common culprits of ranking drops are major changes to a website. If you’ve created a bunch of new pages, made changes to a lot of content or done any redesigning of your site, you’re likely to see your rankings fluctuate. If this is the case, there’s no need to worry—your rankings will likely return to normal.
A variety of technical errors can prevent Google from crawling and indexing your site correctly and have a negative impact on your ranking. Issues like slow load time or too many redirects can cause your ranking to fall. An SEO audit can diagnose any technical issues with your site, allowing you to build out a plan for correcting these errors.Get a Free SEO Audit to find out how well your site is performing.
In many cases, an update to Google’s algorithm is the culprit behind a change in ranking. Google makes hundreds and even thousands of changes to its algorithm each year, and while some are minor, others can have a huge impact on your online marketing. If your ranking has recently dropped, check in to see if Google has recently updated its algorithm.
Sometimes what people are looking for changes drastically, leading Google to adjust its concept of what a relevant website for a particular search query is. Similarly, the demand for a specific product or service can fluctuate over time, meaning certain search terms can become harder to rank for.
Depending on your industry, you may have some pretty intense competition, and their own marketing efforts could push your ranking down. Take a look at what websites have taken your place in Google’s search results and research why they may be performing better than you. Do they have better, more keyword-rich content? Do they have more quality backlinks? Do their pages load faster? Once you know what your competition is doing to beat you, you can develop a plan to take back your ranking.
These are just a few of the reasons why your ranking may have dropped. An SEO audit can help you pinpoint some of the performance and technical errors that may be negatively affecting your ranking, and it’s the first step in building out a comprehensive content strategy to return to the top of the search results.
You’ve designed and built a website for your business and created content. All that’s left to do is to drive more traffic to your site and improve your rankings on Google. You just need a little to optimize your site for search engines and watch the leads roll in.
Now, where do you start?
Most small business owners find themselves here, knowing they need to work on their SEO but lost about where and how to begin. You’re not alone. SEO can be overwhelming and confusing, but it doesn’t have to be.
While SEO has a lot of components, it’s actually a fairly straightforward concept. SEO involves understanding what your target audience is searching for and creating content around those topics, as well as dealing with technical issues that can get in the way of your ranking.
Before you hire an SEO expert or agency to help your site get ranked on the first page of Google, check out our list of do-it-yourself SEO tips to get you started on the right path with optimizing your site.
In order to be found by your desired customers, you have to know how they’re looking for businesses like yours. Think about your ideal customer and list out their general demographics: age, sex, geographic location, etc. You should also think about their pain points: Why would they want to work with your business? How can you solve a problem for them or meet a specific need that they have?
One of the best ways to figure out what your customers want from you is to talk to your previous customers. Find out what questions they had before working with you and what problems you helped them solve. Remember, in order to be found by your target audience, you have to build your content around what they want and need.
Once you have a clear grasp of your target audience and what they’re looking for, it’s time to create content that answers their questions and helps solve their problems. But before you start creating copy for your site and writing blog posts, you need to figure out your keyword strategy. Keywords are the words and phrases that your target audience types into a search engine when they’re looking for products, services or the answer to a question.
Ask yourself: What keywords do you want to rank for on Google and other search engines? Brainstorm keywords related to your industry and the products or services you offer. Keep in mind that you may use different terms for your products and services than customers do, so search for phrases without any of the industry jargon.
Once you know your keywords, see who your top competitors are and what they’re doing right to get ranked on the first page of Google. Ask yourself these questions:
You should also take a look at their social media profiles and reviews to see what users love about working with them. This is a great way to figure out ways you can improve your own offerings and user experience.
Google’s goal is to present the most relevant results to their searchers, so if you want to rank, you need to build content that matches the intent of those searchers. Your content should answer a question or solve a problem that searchers have.
Focus your content around the keywords that users are most likely to search for when seeking services like yours, so build out your site content with those words and phrases in mind. When building out new pages, make sure you create a page for each of your high-priority keywords for which you want to rank.
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the elements of a webpage, such as the content and structure, to help it rank higher in search engine results.This includes:
As you create new content, make sure that you include keywords in the textual elements of the page, such as the headings, title tags and meta descriptions.
If you want to do your SEO work well, you need to gain an understanding of analytics. Understanding your website’s traffic, conversions and other data can help you see where you need to improve and enable you to develop a more powerful SEO strategy.
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track traffic to your website and analyze your visitor demographics. You can use Google Analytics to see how people find and use your website and determine which pages are the most popular. Plus, you can set goals to reach and track your progress.
Using the same content in multiple places on your site can quickly cause your ranking to drop. When search engines find the same piece of content on more than one page, they will show only one page in their search results, keeping the other pages from ranking. Keep your content fresh and original to improve your chances of being pushed to the top of search results.
An internal link connects one page of your site to another. Using internal links on your site makes it easier for users to find and read more of your content and also helps Google to crawl your site.
Optimizing your URLs is a key component of SEO and can have a huge positive effect on your ranking. When creating a new page on your site, make sure that the URL is easy to read and includes relevant keywords that relate to the content of the page. Keep your URLs as short as possible and be sure to use hyphens in between words.
How quickly your website loads is a critical part of how search engines like Google rank your site. A slow load time can also have a negative impact on your user experience, leading visitors to leave your site if pages, images and videos take too long to load.
Don’t you hate it when you visit a website and it takes forever to load? Your prospects feel that way too, so if you want them to stick around and becomes customers, you need to make sure that your site loads quickly.
These days many people are more likely to browse a website on their phone or tablet than on their computer. Google has even made mobile-friendly a factor in how it ranks websites in search results.
A few minor technical issues on your website may not be a big deal, but those small problems can quickly add up and have a negative effect on your SEO.
Start with a free SEO Audit to pinpoint the major technical SEO errors on your site and how to fix them.
