Website Page Structuring and URL re writing - need helpful resources
-
Hello,
I am not technically very sound and I need some good articles that teach me how to think about and go about website pages structuring and url rewriting that is seo friendly.
I will be most obliged if some of you great seomoz-ers can pitch in with help.
Regards,
Talha
-
A web crawler will start at the top of a page and work it's way to the bottom, discovering links and content on the way down. The first links it encounters will be used for anchor text association and weighed more then other links to the same page. Links in content are given greater weight then links in navigation so it is preferable to have those links discovered first.
HTML code can be adjusted to position the navigation after the content. You can look at xenforo which is a forum software developer who designs their software in this manner. If you view the page's source code you will notice the navigation is at the bottom of the HTML code.
With respect to your question on content structuring, there are many pages covering this topic. In general I have two pieces of advice.
1. Have your content reviewed by an English teacher. I am not looking for grammatical corrections (although that helps too) but more along the idea of properly presenting a topic. A good header, intro sentence and paragraph, etc.
2. Examine the wikipedia approach. Most wiki pages perform the basics of SEO content presentation very effectively.
A WBF article which may be of interest: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/improving-content-shareability-whiteboard-friday
-
Hello Ryan...
thank you very much for your suggestion. Had that in mind already.
About website page structuring... I was actually asking about content structuring...
BUT I am surely, surely appreciate if you could also give me a bit of insight (or links) into html structuring.... the suggestion about placing navigation code is extremely interesting... can I know more please sir???
-
Thanks a lot for your response Steven... im most obliged.
I am on my way to understanding url re-writing.
Can you also help me with the remaining part of my question - I want to understand about HOW TO STRUCTURE A WEBSITE FOR MAXIMUM NOTICE BY SEARCH ENGINE SPIDERS.... OR we can rephrase it to be WHAT IS CRAWL FRIENDLY WEBSITE STRUCTURE???
I am sure your answer will be very helpful for mr.
Thanks bro
Peace!
-
Hi Talha.
Since you are an IT company I am guessing you are asking about the general structure of URLs as opposed to the technical details of how to implement the change.
The primary change I recommed with your present URLs is to remove the technology suffix. Change http://www.zigzagsolutions.co.uk/jobs.html to http://www.zigzagsolutions.co.uk/jobs. Also for the home page drop the index.html.
These changes make your URL shorter and friendlier in appearance. You also benefit from more stable URLs. If you later decide to change your web pages to php or another technology, your existing URLs can continue to work without needing to redirect your whole site.
For web page structure, can you offer a bit more detail as to what you are seeking? Are you looking for technical details such as how to structure your html? An example would be placing your navigation code at the bottom of your HTML so search engines see your content first. Or are you asking about how to present your content?
-
I assume you are talking about Mod_rewrite with apache.
Apache's rewrite would be a good start http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html. You say you are not technically strong, but you should be able to copy details from that and just change things around. The matching pattern works on regular expressions so if you have every used this you will find the syntax makes sense. If you haven't then it can look daunting when you first start but its really not that bad and through trial and error you can quickly pick it up.
This is the full reference for mod_rewrite http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html.
Alternatively once you have decided on your friendly URL to actual file mapping, post those in here and I am sure people will be able to help you create the rewrite rules
-
What web server are you using?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
2 pages ranking for same keyword.. Need some advice on what to do.
Here's my question. When I first started my website we started Using keyword anchor building links To my homepage . Over the years Our business has expanded to more than just baby headbands. I now have a baby headband page. When tracking my rankings. I sometimes see Both pages in Google for the same keyword. Other days I do not see both of them. My question is Should I continue building links and keyword anchor text for the home page Or should I switch them and start building keyword-rich anchor text for my baby headband page. I'm just wondering if the Search engine is confused by the two. When searching for the keyword baby headbands. I will sometimes show up for eight and nine. 8 is my home page and 9 is for the baby headband page. I have always shown up for the keyword "baby Headbands" for my home page.
Technical SEO | | PB20070 -
When we have 301 page is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex?
Hi, When we have a page as 301 (Permanent Redirect) is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex? Example http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 when clicked goes to http://www.Somename.com/blogs/whenittyam Should i noindex the below pages http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 and add Rel=Canonical Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change
I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions. I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title to just /post-title and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url. 1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index? 2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before. We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche. We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today. Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com A few examples - if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them. http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/ google search jadakiss consignment mixtape 3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us. The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now. original content here http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/ I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again. It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content? I lied one more. For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music is that preferable or is this causing me issues? Any feedback is appreciated. Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't. Should I be concerned about this? Gd9i6
Technical SEO | | malady0 -
Creating new website with possible Url change (301 involved?)
Hi, I am currently getting a web designer to upgrade my website. I have built lost of links to my internal pages, should I get him to 301 redirect example.com/about.html (old) to example.com/about (new) OR Is there any need for this once the page doesn't change to example.com/about-us? Thank you in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850