Seo In Philadelphia: How Site Architecture Affects Your Rankings

By Author: Stephanie Aiello
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Your website and information architecture can largely affect your search engine rankings. When practicing SEO in Philadelphia, make sure your website meets the following standards for the greatest results. Pleasing both search engines and the human eye takes different efforts that can be achieved with careful planning and development.

Can search engines easily crawl your website?


To understand how search engines read text, think of them as scanners moving at hyper speeds. Once they crawl your website text, each page of your site is stored in a very large index that keeps track of all other web pages the search engines have read. Then, search engines choose the best pages to display in search results according to their standards.

There are certain elements of a website that can cause crawling issues. For example, some applications such as Flash or JavaScript will hide text or links. Although these applications can create very attractive, visually appealing websites, text can be hidden from search engines. So even though your homepage could be found relatively ...
... easily, your internal pages would not be indexed.

To balance out these issues, your website should contain an XML or HTML sitemap. HTML sitemaps are useful when a website is created in a non-html format so search engines have access readable text and links. XML sitemaps allow web developers practicing SEO in Philadelphia to submit files of all the URLs across your entire website to major search engines. Even though XML sitemap submission doesn’t guarantee indexing, it’s the best way for search engines to learn of your website’s existence. Google introduced XML sitemaps, and now Bing, Yahoo, and Ask all support the same protocol. Sitemaps also provide a physical index on your website so visitors can find what they are searching for at a glance.

How fast does your site load?


Did you know Google takes site load time into account when ranking? Although a minor factor, it never hurts to do well where you can. Not to mention that visitors will be much more likely to stay on your website and return to it later if it’s speedy. Compress images, use CSS, pay for reliable hosting – the list of ways to speed up your website goes on and on.

How are your URLs written?


SEO in Philadelphia depends partly on what words are used in your URL and the format in which it is written. URLs that contain the phrases you would like to be found for can boost rankings for SEO in Philadelphia. Brief, descriptive URLs are the best way to gain searcher attention, producing a higher click through rate (selected twice the number of times as longer URLs with equal positioning). Using dashes is also acceptable to break up URLs.

Some good examples of URLs using SEO in Philadelphia:

Petgroomerspa.com

Phillypetgrooming.com

Petgrooming-pa.com

Also, make sure your internal web pages are optimized using keywords within the content of the page:

Petgroomerspa.com/dog-grooming

Petgroomerspa.com/cat-grooming

Ask yourself these questions as well as get outsider opinions to achieve the most functional business website. The combination of keeping your website SEO-friendly and user-friendly will help produce the strongest results.


Stephanie Aiello is a freelance writer for Boomtown Internet Group, a full service Internet marketing company providing web design and SEO Philadelphia. Visit our website to learn more about web design Philadelphia.