The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Website Architectural Issues
This is a continuation of a series of website marketing checklists. Check out all Web Marketing Checklists in this series.
What this is about: This list covers several elements regarding the architectural aspects of a website that focus on building a more search engine friendly site overall.
Why this is important: Website architecture can make or break the performance of a website in the search engines. Poor architectural implementation can create numerous stumbling blocks, if not outright roadblocks, to the search engines as they attempt to crawl your website. On the other hand, a well-implemented foundation can assist both visitors and search engines as they navigate through your website, therefore increasing your site’s overall performance.
What to look for:
Stoney deGeyter is the President of Pole Position Marketing, a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm helping businesses grow since 1998. Stoney is a frequent speaker at website marketing conferences and has published hundreds of helpful SEO, SEM and small business articles.
If you’d like Stoney deGeyter to speak at your conference, seminar, workshop or provide in-house training to your team, contact him via his site or by phone at 866-685-3374.
Stoney pioneered the concept of Destination Search Engine Marketing which is the driving philosophy of how Pole Position Marketing helps clients expand their online presence and grow their businesses. Stoney is Associate Editor at Search Engine Guide and has written several SEO and SEM e-books including E-Marketing Performance; The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!; Keyword Research and Selection, Destination Search Engine Marketing, and more.
Stoney has five wonderful children and spends his free time reviewing restaurants and other things to do in Canton, Ohio.
This question is regarding link text color. Is there anything that states the standard blue link text is better than other colors?
@SEMaven It’s becoming less and less important that link color be blue. Blue links are a carryover from the days when, well, all links were blue. As site designs improved links gradually started changing color to match with the design. It’s almost rare now for links to be blue.
On the other hand, search engines and other popular sites such as wikipedia still use blue text for links and there are still “old school” web users out there. For absolute usability, keep your links blue. But this is one convention that is less important.
Underlining your links, however should be non-debatable. 🙂
Just to add that neater solution is to underline links using border-bottom attribute instead of text-decoration: undeline.
This will make the underline perfectly go beneath the text without cutting descender, the part of the text below the baseline.
Sasa, thanks for that. Thats something I had never thought of.
Great post!thank you
Great post and series!
I have a question about: “All global navigation should use absolute links at all times.”
I’ve heard conflicting opinions about this..I think it is logical that links should be absolute as well, but I have been hesitant to make the designers go through the trouble of changing them without any more solid evidence. Can you elaborate or point me to other resources that suggest absolute links?
Also, why add nofollow to the shopping cart? What if the shopping cart has static, optimized product pages that you want crawled?
Thanks again for the great info in this series and I look forward to your feedback 🙂
Pam
@ Pam – Relative links in nav work just as well, but we find that by using absolute links you fix a number of potential problems. 1) ensures that visitors go to the proper “version” of each page in regard to having the www. or not. This can be fixed in other ways as well, but no sense forcing the link value to be “redirected” instead of actually pointing to the proper location in the first place. 2) it also helps when using include files for your navigation when pages are more than one level deep. Again, relative will work, but it’s not as, well, absolute. 🙂
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