Question

Standard SEO caveat: It’s a black box, and the algorithms are proprietary, and trying to predict and game the search engines is a crappy way to make a living.

That said, what are the baseline steps you want to take to make sure your content is visible to the major search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

I’m specifically curious as to what role your URI Information Architecture plays. It’s common wisdom that you want keywords in your URI, and you want to avoid the query-string laden approach, but what else beyond that?

A quick example of what I’m talking about. Based on something I read on a forum, I recently exposed a /category/* hierarchy on my site. In the following weeks I noticed a sharp uptick in my page views.

I’m curious what other basic steps a site/weblog should take with its URIs to ensure a baseline visibility.

Answer 1

A few URI tips that have kept me ranking:

• Write URIs in English but include a unique ID. SO does this well: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1278157/seo-and-uri-structure
• Stay consistent when linking to a page: domain.com/, domain.com/index and domain.com/index.php are different URIs
• Use .html extensions, or purely /one/two/ directories for pages

There’s probably hundreds of other tips! The structure of linking plays a very important role too…

• Logically break your site down into many categories/subcategories
• Link all pages back to your homepage
• Don’t link to hundreds of pages from your homepage

EDIT: Oh I forgot a very important one – a proper 404 response!

Hopefully that helps a bit