March 2012
Beginner
713 pages
24h 48m
English
Content preview from The Art of SEO, 2nd EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Defining Your Site’s Information Architecture
Whether you’re working with an established website or not, you should plan to research the desired site architecture (from an SEO perspective) at the start of your SEO project. This task 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 CMSs to track individual users surfing a 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. If you are not able to do this, make sure you use
rel="canonical"on your URLs (what this is, and how to use it, is explained in Chapter 6).- Superfluous flags in the URL
Related to the preceding two items is the notion of extra junk being present in the URL. This probably does not bother Google, but it may bother the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.