Search Friendly Development

Search Friendly Site Architecture
One of the first things we do when a client says they want to build a website is key word research! Making the sites file names and categories coincide with key phrase concepts ensures that users can easily find your key topics and that the search engines see groups of content in each area.

A typical sitemap concept

Home
About
Products (all products simply listed on this page)
Services (all services simply listed on this page)
Contact

Search Engine Friendly Sitemap Concept

Home
About
Widgets
     Red Widgets (Separate pages with URL's named accordingly)
     Blue Widgets
     Green Widgets
Widget Services
     Widget Service A
     Widget Service B
     Widget Service C
Contact

Search Friendly Content Management Systems

Timeliness of information is critical to any Web site. Information can be published instantaneously and updated immediately, but that seldom happens since companies often rely on external "webmasters" to make edits. A content management system allows your marketing team, with limited technical know-how, to update the main elements of a website such as text and photos. Many CMS systems are built in a way that use a database which produces URL's that the search engines can't crawl. If the search engines can't see you pages as unique pages you are in big trouble if you want to rank in the search engines. Even when the search engines can see many CMS pages most page names will have special characters such as ?ID=Etc. This is bad Make sure if you are building a CMS system that the programmers not only talk to us first but they sign a contract that states that the URL's will be clean and keyword rich such as yoursite.com/jobs/mechanical-design-jobs.aspx

An example technical outline of a search friendly job database and admin area with CMS is as follows:

Jobs Database/Admin Project Specification.

The following components will be tracked and may be edited:

Categories

Each category contains:

• Name: a few words or less, no markup
• Short Description: one to two lines, no markup
• Long Description: A single paragraph. May contain markup.

Job

Each job contains:

• Title: one line, no markup
• Location: one line, no markup
• Content: No length limit. May contain markup.

Other fields may also be tracked, but will not be editable.

The following pages or visual components will exist:

Note that the URLs provided are shown as examples only; the actual URL may be different than as displayed here.

Category Sidebar: (shown on all pages)
Contains the list of category names, each linked to take you to the list of jobs within that category

Index Page: http://example.com/jobs
Contains the list of category names, each linked to take you to the list of jobs within that category. Below each category name appears the category short description.

Category Page / Job List: http://example.com/jobs/1/manufacturing
Displays the category name, and category long description. For each active job listing within that category, also displays the job title and job location, with the title linked to take you to the job description page.

Job Description Page: http://example.com/jobs/1/manufacturing/37/senior-engineer
Displays the category name, the job title, the job location, and the job content. Also displays the category description in a less-conspicuous area (such as below the job description) in order to increase search ranking.

Job Multi-Listing Page: http://example.com/jobs/1/manufacturing/all
This page is for search-engine ranking only, and is not intended to be part of the normal navigation. However, since high-ranked pages often end up as landing destinations from search engines, this page must be presentable and usable as well.
Displays the same thing as the Job Description Page, except lists all the jobs on a single page.

Admin Category List: http://example.com/jobs/admin/
Contains a list of categories, and their long and short descriptions. Everything is editable, and contains an area for you to add a new category. Contains links to the job listings for each category.

Admin Job List: http://example.com/jobs/admin/15/
Contains a list of jobs associated with a category. Jobs can be deleted from this list. Contains a link for adding new jobs.

Admin Job Details: http://example.com/jobs/admin/15/23/
Contains fields for editing the contents of a job listing. Also used for adding new jobs.

Notes

URLs will be formatted to enhance search recognition. Namely, the URL will contain both the category name and the job name, and will not contain "query string" arguments. This rule does not apply in the "admin" area, which will not be outward-visible.

The admin area will be password-protected using the operating system's normal access control mechanisms, rather than table-based user access control.

Search Friendly Shopping carts

You've heard the old saying. In retail, there are three things that are critical for success: location, location, location! The same is true of e-commerce. If you're selling products or services via the Web, your customers have to find you quickly and easily. Shopping carts like CMS systems benefit from key phrases in the URL's and a proper site architecture.

See www.fishermansoutfitter.com that has the following SEO benefits:

CSS based left hand navigation so that the keywords are in the links to the pages
Keywords in the URLS
Categories such as Reels
Subcategories Such as Spinning Reels
Manufacturer Pages
Product Detail Pages
Blog Posts and Resources to support the product info

Read more in our Our Work