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Posted in SEO | link structure on-site SEO search engine optimization site structure sitewide SEO URLs
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Too many focus their search engine optimization on details like keyword density, which are all but insignificant if you forget to look at the big picture. All search engine optimization should begin from the site level, because if your sitewide SEO is no good, you won’t even get indexed.
By making your website structure search engine compatible, you enable deep crawling of your website, and increase the percentage of pages indexed. Proper structure includes well interlinked documents with search engine friendly URL addresses. Each document should also exist at one location only.
URL Structure
A search engine friendly URL address is not a dynamic URL with many parameters, like”‘?pid=194&ref=199993″. If possible, it should be static (ending either “.php”, “.html” or something similar). If it must be dynamic then one, or maximum two parameters should be used.
URLs should also be descriptive, because matching a keyword in the URL may improve the SERP position of the document. In WordPress, I recommend using the custom permalink structure “%category%/%postname%/” though other good options also exist.
Related to URL structure is the fact that every document should only have one URL. This means that you should not include unnecessary parameters in the address - for example addresses with a referral id should be redirected to an address without it (after setting a cookie). Also, you should pick either the WWW version or the non-WWW version of the domain, and redirect the other.
Link Structure
Put simply, the more internal links you have the better. Linking to every page from every other page becomes impossible as the number of pages increases, but as a rule of thumb it should only take two links to arrive to any other page. Having a sitemap (also an XML sitemap) with a list of all pages, and linking to it from every page is a good idea.
Keep in mind that the same is true for internal links as for external links: anchor text matters. Use descriptive text in internal links too. Another similarity is that related links are more effective. Therefore, listing “related” pages is a very good idea to improve inlinking. Categorical archives (and tag archives) also accomplish this.
Conclusions
It is said (and I very much believe) text should be written with humans in mind, not search engines. The same is not true for your site structure: you can design it with crawlers in mind, and there’s nothing humans will lose as a consequence.
Keep URLs and anchor text descriptive, and use inbound links in plenty. Those three guidelines will take you far in on-site search engine optimization. Following them will ensure a search engine compatible website accessible to crawlers.
by Sutocu | November 15, 2007 
Any tips for blogspot optimization?
Blogspot owners have no control of the URL structure, but maintaining a healthy link structure is possible. You won’t have access to as many plugins as WordPress owners, but listing “top posts” and “recent posts” in the sidebar are both good ideas. Other than that, just link to older posts whenever you have the opportunity.
So long as you’re not putting session IDs in the query string, the URL structure isn’t really that important. A few well worded links can overcome a numeric query instead of a useful, descriptive filename in the URL. I work for a catalogue website, with about 50,000 indexed pages served up from roughly a dozen physical pages, and a horrid URL structure. Still, they do fairly well.
With that said, it’s less work to overcome a bad URL structure if you can set out from the start by not making this ‘mistake.’
PS - In WP, you should still have the date in the URL like yours have. If you keep a blog for a couple of years, you’ll eventually want to revisit a topic, so at least having the year and month keep URLs unique.
It’s of course possible to do well even with a less optimized URL structure, but having more than two parameters is not advisable. As long as every page can only be reached with one URL, a URL structure with one or two parameters in the query will work.
Having the date in a WP URL does help keep them unique, but you shouldn’t have that problem. Revisiting a topic is OK, but you should always come up with a unique title for the post. I’m undecided on which is the best WordPress permalink structure, and use different ones on different blogs.
this is the biggest weakness of my pages. hopefully i can turn it around in 08
I know of a site that uses a main domain and 2 other domains parked that point to the main domain.
Do you think that this violates your rule of “every document should only have one URL”?
Depends on how the other two “point” to the main domain. If there’s an HTTP 301 or 302 redirect in place it’s fine. Search engines will know what the “canonical” URL is. If, however, all of the three domains have in effect the same site, that will hurt the rankings of all of them.