How to check a website's architecture?
-
Hello everyone,
I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming.
Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad.
Please help me out on this... I would be obliged.
Eagerly awaiting your responses,
BEst Regards,
Talha
-
CodeAcademy also recently introduced free online coding classes that you can check out - it may be a good way to apply the learnings from your readings.
It takes practice and dedication - and repetition - to learn coding. You have to train yourself to properly apply the code. HTML and CSS are the best places to start, then move onto PHP
-
Thankyou Brendan
I appreciate your assistance brother
best regards,
talha
-
Hi Muhammad, I'm going to answer to the first question.
To start I suggest to read some books, where you can easily find anything you need from an expert, technical point of view. I really love books from O'reilly http://oreilly.com/css-html/index.html and from Manning http://www.manning.com/crowther2/ , but even those from Sitepoint are quite interesting http://products.sitepoint.com/ .
Then, while reading, build some website and try, try, try till the end of the days, because experience is very important in building correct html - css websites.
I don't think it's very important to learn php at the beginning, after your html books you could buy some about php.
-
Hi Muhammad,
This is in response to your second question. I would start by using a tool such as Xenu's Link Sleuth and run a report on your site. This will give you a report of how 'deep' pages are within your site ie. how far they are from your homepage.
As you might know, the general rule for most sites is to have all pages within 3 clicks of the homepage so this is a good way to judge the effectiveness of the site architecture.
Hope that helps,
Brendan.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor0 -
Changing URLS: from a short well optimised URL to a longer one – What's the traffic risk
I'm working with a client who has a website that is relatively well optimised, thought it has a pretty flat structure and a lot of top level pages. They've invested in their content over the years and managed to rank well for key search terms. They're currently in the process of changing CMS and as a result of new folder structuring in the CMS the URLs for some pages look to have significantly changed. E.g Existing URL is: website.com/grampians-luxury-accommodation which ranked quite well for luxury accommodation grampians New URL when site is launched on new CMS would be website.com/destinations/victoria/grampians My feeling is that the client is going to lose out on a bit of traffic as a result of this. I'm looking for information or ways or case studies to demonstrate the degree of risk, and to help make a recommendation to mitigate risk.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moge0 -
How to switch from URL based navigation to Ajax, 1000's of URLs gone
Hi everyone, We have thousands of urls generated by numerous products filters on our ecommerce site, eg./category1/category11/brand/color-red/size-xl+xxl/price-cheap/in-stock/. We are thinking of moving these filters to ajax in order to offer a better user experience and get rid of these useless urls. In your opinion, what is the best way to deal with this huge move ? leave the existing URLs respond as before : as they will disappear from our sitemap (they won't be linked anymore), I imagine robots will someday consider them as obsolete ? redirect permanent (301) to the closest existing url mark them as gone (4xx) I'd vote for option 2. Bots will suddenly see thousands of 301, but this is reflecting what is really happening, right ? Do you think this could result in some penalty ? Thank you very much for your help. Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JeremyICC0 -
I'm a newb, built a website with Wix want to redirect it to a domain I own, but am reading that Wix is bad for this
Hi, I am building this site for my boss http://charlesfridmanpr.wix.com/real-estate and am still working on it. I'm getting close to the stage where I want to redirect it to the URL we want to use, but in reading these forums, it says that because all of subpages (?) have a # in them, they will not be read or indexed by google. I am very new to this, and while it may not look like it, the website has taken me quite a while to design. Is there a way to fix this? We want to appear high up for a non competitive keyword. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlesfridmanpr0 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
Using the same content on different TLD's
HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape1 -
I need help with a local tax lawyer website that just doesn't get traffic
We've been doing a little bit of linkbuilding and content development for this site on and off for the last year or so: http://www.olsonirstaxattorney.com/ We're trying to rank her for "Denver tax attorney," but in all honesty we just don't have the budget to hit the first page for that term, so it doesn't surprise me that we're invisible. However, my problem is that the site gets almost NO traffic. There are days when Google doesn't send more than 2-3 visitors (yikes). Every site in our portfolio gets at least a few hundred visits a month, so I'm thinking that I'm missing something really obvious on this site. I would expect that we'd get some type of traffic considering the amount of content the site has, (about 100 pages of unique content, give or take) and some of the basic linkbuilding work we've done (we just got an infographic published to a few decent quality sites, including a nice placement on the lawyer.com blog). However, we're still getting almost no organic traffic from Google or Bing. Any ideas as to why? GWMT doesn't show a penalty, doesn't identify any site health issues, etc. Other notes: Unbeknownst to me, the client had cut and pasted IRS newsletters as blog posts. I found out about all this duplicate content last November, and we added "noindex" tags to all of those duplicated pages. The site has never been carefully maintained by the client. She's very busy, so adding content has never been a priority, and we don't have a lot of budget to justify blogging on a regular basis AND doing some of the linkbuilding work we've done (guest posts and infographic).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonLancaster0 -
My website hasn't been cached for over a month. Can anyone tell me why?
I have been working on an eCommerce site www.fuchia.co.uk. I have asked an earlier question about how to get it working and ranking and I took on board what people said (such as optimising product pages etc...) and I think i'm getting there. The problem I have now is that Google hasn't indexed my site in over a month and the homepage cache is 404'ing when I check it on Google. At the moment there is a problem with the site being live for both WWW and non-WWW versions, i have told google in Webmaster what preferred domain to use and will also be getting developers to do 301 to the preferred domain. Would this be the problem stopping Google properly indexing me? also I'm only having around 30 pages of 137 indexed from the last crawl. Can anyone tell me or suggest why my site hasn't been indexed in such a long time? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAndy0