Improving the Structure of the website, to optimize its potential for better search engine rankings.
Goals of structuring, or restructuring, a web site:

1. Improving the user experience
2. Improving the “crawlability” of the site
3. Increasing the ranking of individual web pages within the site, and “broadening the profile” of our most important pages.
4. Getting more pages into the search engines’ index, also known as “index penetration.”

Logical Structure (Human)

1. How to create a good user experience without hurting your search engine rankings.
1. The Content Pyramid
1. The World Wide Web
1. The Pyramid is what I used to call the Network.
2. What happens on the web matters, in terms of how other sites talk about and link to your site.
3. The Context of an inbound link “frames” the user’s experience, along with the page to which the visitors is sent
4.  When the page on your site matches what the visitor expected when they clicked the link, you’re likely to have a happy visitor.
2. First Tier: Your Home Page
1. The First tier of the pyramid, the homepage, is where the most visitors enter most web sites.
2.  On your home page, you establish what your site is about, what you offer, etc. – in many ways you frame the user

     experience from this point

1. Your home page is likely to be visited by more people, more often, than any other page on your site.
2. If it’s easy for people to find what they’re looking for from the home page, you win.

1. Second Tier: Categories [“Roadmap Pages”]
1. It is the set of category or directory pages that lead them closer to their goal. Eg: In an e-commerce site selling

     widgets, there might be categories for “colored widgets,” “large widgets,” “chrome widgets,” etc.

1. The Second tier, for most sites, will also include the ultimate roadmap, a site map pages. This is a page that simply carries a link ( and brief description) to many other pages on your site.
2. The Second tier of the site is really any page that’s linked to from the home page (assuming that spiders can follow the link)
1. Third Tier: Content [“Destination Pages”]
1. The Third tier is where most of your important content will reside, if you have a typical web site.
2. For eg:-In an online shopping site, the third tier is usually where you’ll find the actual product detail pages.
3. A visitor typically moves from the home page to a roadmap page, then to a destination page. If destinations are very popular then you have direct links from the home page.eq: Desc of features and benefits, pricing etc.
4. From an SEO perspective, the third tier is anything that’s two clicks away from the home page.

Logical Structure (Human) (cont…)

1. Tier Four : Deep Content
1. Creating a third tier may be all that is needed in many cases.
2. Even sites that are basically three-tier structures may have supporting pages (shipping rates, product color charts, etc.) that make u a fourth tier in the user’s experience.
3. The Fourth tier is three clicks away from the home page, and special steps may have to be taken to get the search engine to find this content

Designing the “Spider” Structure
Most Websites have a lot of “content overhead” for human visitors, that we really don’t want showing up in search results. Things like the privacy policy, terms of use, contact forms, etc.
Google’s PageRank system makes us pay an even heavier price, because every link we point to one of these “overhead” pages steals PageRank from the pages that we’re trying to get ranked.
Few years ago, the only way to “hide” these links from the search engines was with JavaScript, Flash, or other not-so-user-friendly methods. Now we use a “nofollow” attribute on links. Now we can control the flow of PageRank through our sites, without having to make messy compromises or damaging our site’s usability.

Using Anchor Text for Link Reputation

1. It is point links at the pages you’re trying to get ranked, using all of the search terms that you want the page to rank for.
2. Make sure that you cover your bases and have anchor text for every variation of every search term for every page, at least once or twice. This means cross linking from one page to another, using keywords in the text of the link.
3. Eq:  Page A ranked for “Purple monkey hats” then you put a link from page B to A, with “purple monkey hats” in the text. Page B has sent some link reputation to Page A. Page A should rank just a little higher, when people search for purple monkey hats.

Improving Index Penetration

1. Index Penetration – How many and which pages are actually getting indexed by the search engines.

               
                To a search engine, a page that isn’t in their index may just as well not exist. If you’re pointing links at pages that aren’t getting indexed, the PageRank is passing out through those links into the other. Therefore, it is important in the long run to know which pages are getting indexed, which aren’t, and to take steps to improve.

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