Basics Of Site Architecture

The week chugs on at the SES: Chicago and Murdok' own Chris Richardson picked up on some excellent comments from all the speakers in one of the final sessions from Tuesday, focusing on "Successful Site Architecture" and how to utilize architecture to get the best advantage for search engines. Editor's Note: Architecture is all about building and design. Discuss your favorite site building tips at Barbara C. Coll, CEO of Webmama.com Inc, moderated this informative session. Three speakers imparted their thoughts on the audience. One speaker Rajat Mujherjee. He focused primarily on getting into his employer's index, but since it's Yahoo, it's quite useful. One important suggestion he made was to optimize for both spiders and indexing. He said spiders don't evaluate content. The indexing algorithm does this. Also make sure your robot.txt allows Slurp (Yahoo's spider). His final recommendations were to always link back to your homepage and quality content is essential. If you used GUI-based navigation, it's important to have a text based navigation system to accompany the GUI based system. He also got in a plug to use Yahoo's Site Explorer, although any of the site explorers out there would probably work to delve into your site and return pertinent info. This session provided a lot of good information for improving site architecture. By cleaning up a site, keeping relatively simple URLs, strong unique content, and keeping the content topical, improvement can be easily noticed. John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.