SEO and URI Structure

Question

Standard SEO caveat: It's a black box, and the algorithms are proprietary, and trying to predict and game the search engines is a crappy way to make a living.

That said, what are the baseline steps you want to take to make sure your content is visible to the major search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

I'm specifically curious as to what role your URI Information Architecture plays. It's common wisdom that you want keywords in your URI, and you want to avoid the query-string laden approach, but what else beyond that?

A quick example of what I'm talking about. Based on something I read on a forum, I recently exposed a /category/* hierarchy on my site. In the following weeks I noticed a sharp uptick in my page views.

I'm curious what other basic steps a site/weblog should take with its URIs to ensure a baseline visibility.

Answer 1

some simple things ...

1. meaningful and accurate meta fields (especially description, keywords)

2. a valid hn hierarchy on every page (e.g. h1 h2 h3 h2 h2 h3 h3 h4 h3 h2)

3. all (text) content accessible to a text browser

4. check spellings

5. keep content and display functionality separated (e.g. use HTML and CSS fully)

6. validate CSS and (X)HTML and use standard DOCTYPES

7. relevant <title> for each page

8. sensible site hierarchy and no orphan pages

Answer 2

A few URI tips that have kept me ranking:

• Write URIs in English but include a unique ID. SO does this well: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1278157/seo-and-uri-structure
• Stay consistent when linking to a page: domain.com/, domain.com/index and domain.com/index.php are different URIs
• Use .html extensions, or purely /one/two/ directories for pages

There's probably hundreds of other tips! The structure of linking plays a very important role too...

• Logically break your site down into many categories/subcategories
• Link all pages back to your homepage
• Don't link to hundreds of pages from your homepage

EDIT: Oh I forgot a very important one - a proper 404 response!

Hopefully that helps a bit

Answer 3

1) Don't use www subdomain if you do not have to. If you or your company has made the mistake of using subdomains for asset management then you likely forced into using www just to be safe.

2) The biggest problem faced by search engines is redundant URIs for the same page. This problem is solved by using a canonical link tag in your HTML. This will perhaps help you more than any other single SEO factor.

3) Make your URIs meaningful. If people can remember URIs well enough to type them out your SEO will be significantly improved.

The most important factors with URIs is easy to remember and the ability to specify uniqueness to the search engine. Nothing else matters with regard to URIs and SEO.