Do you know what one of the biggest success factors is in search engine optimization (SEO)? It is your site architecture. And this also explains why it is so important to have a professional SEO company working on your side, because architecture is hugely complex. Let’s take a look at some of the key things an SEO company will do for you when they build your website.
Site Crawlability
Search engines have spiders and crawlers, which are basically little programs that go through your pages at lightning speed, reading everything that is there. They store what they see in an index, and a different robot then goes through this index to determine what should show up and where. So, unless you can be placed in the index, you can’t be found. Crawling is usually no problem, but if you have Flash or JavaScript, then some of your links could be hidden and therefore can’t be crawled either.
Canonicalization and Duplication
It will come as no surprise that this huge index can get a bit messed up. If the index is looked through, and different pages look almost the same, the spiders will think that it is repeated content, and that doesn’t look good. A good SEO company will, therefore, engage in canonicalization. What this does, is build trust and authority and essentially ensures that only a single version of every page is available for indexing. Accidental duplication is all too easy to do. For instance, you may have a www. version of your page, and a non-www. version.
Mobile Optimization
Another key thing that a good SEO company will do for you is mobile optimize it. The amount of traffic that goes to websites through mobile devices is soon surpassing traffic from desktops. It is no surprise, therefore, that the search engines have attached a lot of value to websites that are mobile optimized as well. You need to use app linking and app indexing as well, wherever possible.
Site Speed
Google has indicated that fast websites will get an advantage over smaller ones, as it wants to make the internet a really fast speed. While it is a minimal factor – only 1% of queries are affected by it – it is important, mainly because various other factors are reinforced by being quicker. This is particularly true for mobile access.
Descriptive URLs
If you have hired an SEO company, it is likely that they will have talked to you about your URLs and your domain names. This may sound confusing, but it is actually hugely important. People need to be able to see your URL and immediately understand how it is relevant to the information they expected to find.
Security
Last but not least, an SEO company will also make sure your website is secure. The most important element of this is making you run on a https: server. This also instantly gives you a ranking boost.
Put together, this is the technical element your SEO company will get involved in.
