Leveraging Website Development: Architecture for a Better Website ROI
Throughout the educational material on this site you will frequently encounter the word "architecture".
Our website development services are always carried out within the context of the overall perspective of your website's architecture for a better website ROI.
Website development can be compared to building a house. In some cases a closer analogy would be a much larger edifice—a skyscraper meant to serve large-scale human needs. No one would try to construct a single room in that building without first planning and designing the overall structure that will support it.
In the case of web design and development, that structure can be planned around the characteristics of today's search engine ranking algorithms in order to leverage your command of important keywords.
How architecture became a critical SEO factor
Years ago it was quite reasonable to begin a website development project with a piecemeal approach to its construction. This changed when the search engines reached a critical level of sophistication in their ranking algorithms. A huge conceptual divide got crossed when Google figured out how to get its spiders to recognize relevant content.
Google was forced to develop a truly sophisticated relevance-sniffing capacity in its algorithms because of the "cleverness" of "black-hat" SEO "experts" who focused their efforts on techniques designed to fool the search engines. Google has to constantly fight spam SEO techniques in order to stay in business. Imagine what you would think of Google if you did a search for some critical information and all you got in your search engine results were pages and pages of spam!
Of course this battle between "black hat" SEO tricksters and search engines will probably continue as long as there are search engines and people with a mind to trick them. But an increasing number of SEO professionals are embracing the search engine companies as partners rather than adversaries. "White hat" SEO professionals believe that a good search engine is a marvellous, priceless tool and choose to compete for ranking by cooperating with the search engines' efforts to produce relevant results. The means: produce relevant results!
How search engines recognize relevance
To produce relevant results for search engines means you must provide high-quality content. But it
requires more than that because of the nature of the algorithms by which search engine robots manage
to detect relevance. They do that by analyzing a website's architecture.
A search engine robot recognizes a website's architecture through its internal linking structure.
Specifically, the robot looks at the anchor text of a link and the heading text on the target page.
It augments its perception of relevance by the degree of correlation between recognizeable topics
(sometimes using sophisticated synonym recognition to detect a topic) between linked pages as
evidenced in keyword density, <title> tags, heading tags and html names.
Website architecture supports website marketing strategy
Linking structures are everything when it comes to aggressive search engine optimization. These same linking structures are also the foundation of
an effective website marketing strategy!
If you want a brilliantly effective website that supports your business goals and drives an impressive
return on investment, architecture is the key. Your website marketing strategy will be reflected in the
physical architecture of your website through "scent trails".
To a search engine spider these scent trails establish relevance and thus boost your site's position in
search results for the keywords you target. For your human visitors, these scent trails make it easy for
people to take an interest-based path through their process of gathering the information that they
need in order to feel comfortable becoming your customer.
Individual Page Architecture and SEO
The architecture of each individual page can help increase website traffic. Headings and opening text are critical, and the text needs to be readily available to search engine robots.
For "radical SEO" we construct the html in such a way that the very first thing a search engine spider sees is your topic heading and (highly optimized) first paragraph.
Learn More about