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Why Site Structure Is An Important Part of SEO
By HHI Golf Guy | October 24, 2007
We recently took over the SEO services for an Austin Real Estate web site. One of the first items that I look at is the overall indexing of the web site. Specifically, I look at the site titles and descriptions picked up by the search engines as well as the total pages indexed and the cached results of each page.
What I found on this site was typical of most web site designs. The site had a decent amount of information, and thousands of real estate listings. But almost every page had the same title tag (HomeCity). That’s a big no-no in the world of SEO.
Another problem occured with the page descriptions being picked up by Google. For the thousands of listing pages, the descriptions were almost identical. To combat these problems I had their programmer go back and create dynamic title and description tags based on the page content pulled from the database. To date, they are still working on this feature, although it should be completed within a week or so.
The problem with this site is that the when the search engines see the same title tag on all pages (and oull the same basic info for descriptions) is that the search engines no longer consider these pages to be unique. When that happens, they lose their relevance and importance and no longer provide a good foundation for the overall keyword themes of your web site. It also means that a search engine like Google will place less crawling importance on these pages. For example, I was seeing cache dates that were more than a few months old.
One the programming changes are complete, the next step will be to upload a robots.txt and create an XML sitemap. Right now the site is enough of a mess where implementing these items won’t really help. There’s a lot more to do with this site, but improving some basic on page SEO will help with crawling, indexing, and rankings.
Topics: General SEO |
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