How to Create a Website Structure Which Embraces SEO

At Click Dealer, our SEO experts and web developers have worked together to design a platform that ticks as many boxes as possible for search engines, so that each website that we create for our dealers is optimised and has a strong chance of ranking highly in search results. We recommend devising a strategy for your sitemaps, URL structure and source code before building a website.

Sitemap

Search engines want to present their users with high-quality sites on which they will have an excellent experience, and one thing they look at to assess the usability of a website is the sitemap. Here, you can list all of the pages that your site consists of and define the organisation of your website.

A good sitemap is one which makes sense. Before creating your website, you should plan out a hierarchy, which shows how your pages are connected. Ideally, the site structure should be simple and logical, with pages placed where users would expect to find them and internal links incorporated throughout.

Not only will search engines recognise sites with a strong structure as better for user experience, but their bots will find them easier to crawl through and the link juice will flow better, and internal hyperlink networks are a big ranking factor.

URL Structure

A URL is essentially a web page’s address, which can be used to help users locate resources on the internet. URLs are taken into consideration when search engines determine ranking order for a particular search query, so they must be optimised.

Best practice dictates that URL structure should follow your sitemap hierarchy. If you were to use the hierarchy from the first section, the URL structure for the Audi page should look like this: www.clickdealercars.co.uk/cars/audi.

It is important for URLs to be simple and relevant so that both users and search engines can understand them. Click Dealer’s SEM experts recommend purchasing a keyword-rich domain. Try to include a keyword in your URL paths but if it does not fit naturally, do not force it in, as this may harm your click-through rate.

Source code

Source code is what tells web browsers how to display your site. It lists content on a web page in a language that applications like Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari can understand and search engines use it to find out what your site is about.

The most important element of source code that search engines will assess when they determine how relevant a web page is to a search query is its title tag. H1 tags and Alt tags are also considered so these must all accurately describe the content on your page to give you the best chance of achieving a high rank.

If there is similar content on several of your web pages, you may wish to consider canonicalisation, to prevent search engines seeing it as duplicate content, which you may be penalised for. You can specify which URL you want to be prioritised in search results by adding a canonical tag in your source code or no index tags for pages that you do not want to appear in on results pages.

To find out more about our search-engine-optimised car dealer websites, contact Click Dealer by emailing marketing@clickdealer.co.uk, calling us on 01782 478220 or get in touch via our contact page.