Our Support Center
SEO Improving Structure
Improve the structure of your URLs
Simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily
Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, "friendlier" URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.
URLs like (1) can be confusing and unfriendly. Users would have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it. Also, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary, especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part, breaking the link.
Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the anchor text. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would (2).
URLs are displayed in search results
Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document's title and snippet. Like the title and snippet, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user's query. Below is another example showing a URL on our domain for a page containing an article about the rarest baseball cards. The words in the URL might appeal to a search user more than an ID number like "www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/article/102125/" would.
Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some webmasters try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URL to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we'd like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site. To learn even more about good URL structure, we recommend this Webmaster Help Center page on creating Google-friendly URLs.
Improving the structure of your Cabanova Website pages URLs
Rather than naming your Website homepage “Home”, it would be more SEO friendly if you give it your company name for instance.
Pages URL (2) are automatically generated based on the chosen page name at the Cabanova Sitebuilder level (1).
Since pages URLs are highly rankable by Google comparing to the text content, they can be used to improve the organic search of your Website by including some relevant keywords in the page names.
Rather than naming your Website homepage “Home”, it would be more SEO friendly if you give it your company name for instance.
Furthermore, some users might link to your page using the URL of that page. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than an ID or oddly named parameter would.
Best Practices
Use words in URLs
- URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.
Avoid:
- using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
- choosing generic page names like "page1.html"
- using excessive keywords like"baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm"
Create a simple directory structure
- Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.
Avoid:
- having deep nesting of subdirectories like ".../dir1/dir /dir /dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html"
- using directory names that have no relation to the content in them
Make your site easier to navigate
Navigation is very important for search Engines
The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important.
Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.
Plan out your navigation based on your homepage
All sites have a home or "root" page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (e.g. root page -> related topic listing -> specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages?
At Cabanova, you’re provided with a fully customizable navigation inserting a navigation menu into your Cabanova Website module,which is already SEO friendly. Click here to find out more about inserting a navigation menu into your Cabanova Website.
Ensure more convenience for users by using ‘breadcrumb lists’
A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page (1). Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections out to the right.
You can create your Breadcrumb List on your Cabanova Website by using the Internal Link fuction, which is available at the Cabanova Sitebuilder level. Click here to find out how to create Internal Links on your Cabanova Website.
Prepare two sitemaps: one for users, one for search engines
A site map (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
An XML Sitemap (upper-case) file, which you can submit through Google's Webmaster Tools, makes it easier for Google to discover the pages on your site. Using a Sitemap file is also one way (though not guaranteed) to tell Google which version of a URL you'd prefer as the canonical one (e.g. http://brandonsbaseballcards.com/ or http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/; more on what's a preferred domain).
Google helped create the open source Sitemap Generator Script to help you create a Sitemap file for your site. To learn more about Sitemaps, the Webmaster Help Center provides a useful guide to Sitemap files.
At Cabanova, the XML Sitemap is handled automatically, while site map for users can be created very easily. Click here for more info.
Sitemaps:
A. site map (lower-case):
You can create a site map for Users by creating a new page on your Website, inserting text fields into it then configuring each field with a page name as an Internal Link pointing to the corresonding page.
To set text as Internal Link, please refer to the instructions within the previous page.
B. Sitemap (Upper-case):
This part is handled automatically by our system. an XML dynamic Sitemap gets automatically generated and update for every Website built
with the Cabanova Sitebuilder.
Further on this guide, you'll find a detailed tutorials on to submit the XML Sitemap to Google for indexing using the Google Webmaster Tools.
Best Practices
Create a naturally flowing hierarchy
- Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure.
Avoid:
- creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page
- going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (so that it takes twenty clicks)
Use mostly text for navigation
- Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. Many users also prefer this over other approaches, especially on some devices that might not handle Flash or JavaScript.
Avoid:
- having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations many, but not all, search engines can discover such links on a site, but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links, this will improve the accessibility of your site; more on how Google deals with non-text files.
