What You Need to Know About SEO (Website Architecture – Part 3 of 3) Fueled Friday


Written on February 19, 2010 – 7:47 am | by oldschool

This is the last of this 3 part series on “what you need to know about SEO.” Originally, I only wanted to cover the main two aspects (web content and links) but I realized that many people are still unaware of what a search engine friendly website architecture is.

In short, you want to build a website with URL’s that have your keywords in them as opposed to those that have query strings and contain characters such as “&” or “=”. You normally see query strings associated with ecommerce websites and it is basically showing you where the web server is looking to produce the webpage – but it make for an ugly, non search engine friendly URL. It is also common to see non search engine friendly URL’s with websites that are constructed with a Content Management System (CMS).

Here is an example of a search engine friendly URL: http://www.azrebsi.com/blog/2010/01/owe-more-than-your-home-is-worth-help-is-here/. This is a URL produced by a WordPress blog. There are actually settings in WordPress that determine whether or not you will have search engine friendly URL’s or not (under the section called Permalinks). If you are using WordPress as a CMS or blog, you will want to make sure that these setting are correct. And if they are not and you change them you may have some issues with your old URL’s changing.

Amazon gets a lot of bad PR from SEO folks as their URL’s are very commonly used to show examples of non search engine friendly URL’s. I don’t think it matters because they are such a strong web property, and because over time the search engines will often index dynamic URL’s from strong sites such as Amazon. Here is an example of a typical Amazon.com URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015T963C?ie=UTF8&tag=finamark-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=B0015T963C

Take a look at your website and determine whether or not you have search engine friendly URL’s or not. If you do, then you are on the right track. If you do not, then you have a potential hindrance to obtaining search engine success. If you need help, let’s chat!

Have a great weekend. I am off to the races for three day!

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anthonykirlew has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

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  1. 2 Responses to “What You Need to Know About SEO (Website Architecture – Part 3 of 3) Fueled Friday”

  2. By Calvin Bacon on Feb 27, 2010 | Reply

    Anthony,

    Thanks for the suggestions on search engine URLs. Also thanks for last responding to my comment last week. I mentioned that my page rank had gone down. I assumed this was a major problem.

    However, you asked how much of my traffic comes from Google. After taking a closer look at my statistics, I see that less than 2 percent of my traffic is from Google. Most of my traffic comes from bookmarks and direct links. Maybe for my relatively new site, Google is not all that important.

  3. By oldschool on Mar 1, 2010 | Reply

    Calvin,

    I am sorry I did not get to post the follow up that I wanted to. It is still in the works; I have just been busy.

    The real question is “what percentage of your traffic was Google prior to the PageRank drop?” Of course, if you have enough converting traffic without Google, then with Google, your business should really see some action. It is nice to not have to rely on any source for a significant part of your business because any changes could have a dramatic impact on your business.

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