Website Architecture Analysis
A web page unless indexed cannot generate any traffic from search engines. Next what matters is the way search engines include pages in their database. Thiscan be considered as the starting point of evaluation for overall search marketing performance.
Search engines might index pages depending on how a site is built and the value it provides to certain audience or visitors. Now the search engines might index thousands of pages, or they might index just one page from a certain website depending on how a site is built and the theme of the site. Search engine spiders crawl the Web and include web pages they find relevant within their search engine index.
Its a belief that about 20% of all material published online is indexed by the search engines. For instance if a website has one thousand pages and if only ten of them are indexed then only 10% of the website is available on search engine results page. Therefore the more pages can be indexed, the more keywords one can compete for. This means if we can index 100% of an website then these pages would represent hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to be found. An web page can not rank in search results if it is not t indexed!
Let us look at some of the architectural items that can impact indexing:
* Site maps
* Length of URL
* Cookies usage
* Search engine exclusion protocols
* Site navigation
* Links at header
* Links at footer
* Session ID’s
* Multiple query parameters within URLs
* Form based navigation
* Directory structure
* Content publishing
* Spider traps