Defining Your Site’s Information Architecture
Whether you have built a site already or not, you should plan to research the desired site architecture (from an SEO perspective) at the start of your SEO project, a task which can be divided into two major components: technology decisions and structural decisions.
Technology Decisions
As we outlined previously in this chapter, your technology choices can have a major impact on your SEO results. The following is an outline of the most important issues to address at the outset:
- Dynamic URLs
Although Google now states that dynamic URLs are not a problem for the company, this is not entirely true, nor is it the case for the other search engines. Make sure your CMS does not end up rendering your pages on URLs with many convoluted parameters in them.
- Session IDs or user IDs in the URL
It used to be very common for your CMS to track individual users surfing your site by adding a tracking code to the end of the URL. Although this worked well for this purpose, it was not good for search engines, because they saw each URL as a different page rather than variants of the same page. Make sure your CMS does not ever serve up session IDs.
- Superfluous flags in the URL
Related to the preceding two items is the notion of extra junk being present on the URL. This probably does not bother Google, but it may bother the other search engines, and it interferes with the user experience for your site.
- Links or content based in JavaScript, Java, or Flash
Search engines ...