Site Architecture
A website should be well designed and easy to navigate. Every major search engine, from Google to Yahoo! to MSN, prefers that you create a site to appeal to your users, not their spiders. After all, even if you get increased traffic to your site, it’s what users do once they get to your pages that matters most. When creating or improving your site navigation, always consider the opinions of your visitors.
Google, Yahoo and MSN prefer flat navigation rather than deep hierarchies. Most pages should be accessible within two to three clicks from the main page. If Flash menus are the only way to get to the other pages on your website, search engines won’t be able to navigate your website or index interior pages. To get around this, at the bottom of the home page, there should be hypertext links to the web pages in that section. Every page will need to have text hyperlinks to web pages within its section.
Site Map
Your site’s architecture (navigation structure) is important to aid search engines in indexing the website by making sure that search engine spiders can actually find each page of the website. For larger websites, it is prudent to develop a site map in XML or HTML format, upload the file and then submit its URL to the major search engines. For websites with graphical navigation or built in Flash, a site map is imperative.
