- What is Site Architecture?
Site architecture is the structure as defined by linked web pages that defines the visitor's experience with the site as the visitor moves from page to page experiencing the site. Architecture is often neglected, and many site have exactly the same pages linked in exactly the same way. we pay a great deal of attention to the site architecture. We believe that architecture and content are the cornerstones of a highly successful web site.

What is Search Engine Compatible Site Architecture?
Your website must be search engine friendly or compatible.
Often sites are built in ways that may them difficult or impossible for search engines to “spider”. (Search engines use automated software robots to spider or follow the page links within web sites and interpret what the pages are about). If a search engine can’t spider your site then it won’t add it to its index - meaning your site won’t appear in search results.
It should be noted that the design aspects of a site with great user functionality often conflict with requirements conducive to achieving good rankings in search engines. The requirements of the two distinctive audiences (end-users, i.e. people) and search engine spiders (robots) are very different. What may be beneficial for one audience can be detrimental to the other. For example, search engine spiders index text. They don’t index many of the other elements added to website pages by designers to enhance appeal and user functionality, such as graphical images and Flash. The trick of course is to try and meet the requirements of both audiences - i.e. have a site that appeals to the primary audience (people) and yet is search engine friendly. Whilst there is no doubt the most important audience to satisfy is people, the need for making the site search engine compatible should not be overlooked. More than 80% of Internet users rely on search engines and directories as their preferred method for locating web sites Just because your site’s been built by a major web development company doesn’t necessarily mean this won’t apply to you. US Fortune 100 companies spend millions developing web sites and yet a survey of websites belonging to US Fortune 100 companies found that 97% of them had some type of site architecture problem that might cause problems being found by search engines. The use of JavaScript, Flash, frames and some popular dynamic delivery systems may cause crawler-based search engines to miss indexing pages. (Survey by iProspect, May 2001)
Elements of Site Architecture That Impact Search Ranking

I’ll be honest with you. Only about 84 percent of me decided to attend this afternoon’s Successful Site Architecture panel because I’m intelligent and realize how important it is to design a site that knocks down indexing obstacles. The other, more vapid, part of me remembered how absolutely adorable Derrick Wheeler is and very much wanted to spend an hour coyly staring at him. Based on that reasoning, I decided it would be in my best interest to attend. And I’m still pretty glad I did.
Anyway, onto the session. Barbara Coll, better known as WebMama, moderated today’s panel that included super cutie Derrick Wheeler and known accessibility king Matt Bailey. The theme of the session: breaking down crawling barriers so the search engines can index your site. The engines want to index your site, and if they can’t, it’s entirely your fault. Fix it.
WebMama’s first assertion is that most site designers pay little, if any, attention to SEO while designing a site. That’s some sad news. If your site is (and thereby your business) important to you and your goals, why would you make search engine optimization an afterthought? It’s just not wise. Your goal as a site owner is to achieve high rankings in organic search for the keywords that convert best for you. In order to do that, your pages need to show up in the search engines. That’s where site architecture comes in. It’s about constructing the building blocks of your site in a way that encourages indexing. It’s about looking for optimization opportunities and seeking out Web developers and site designers who have SEO experience or partners. The first step in successful site architecture is to get the team on board. If you don’t have the executives on your side, you’ll never have the support you need to make your site as great as it can be. In order to make friends, you may have to resort to educating them, convincing, or if all else fails, bribing them. I know dark chocolate or coffee works best on me.
Once you have the backing, you need to figure out where you are. How do you take what you have and turn it into successful site architecture?
The fact is most people aren’t starting out with a blank slate. Derrick notes that during this stage you need to:

• Uncover all of your site’s domains and subdomains.
• Identify the number of unique Web pages on each domain or subdomain.
• Measure the number of pages from your site that are indexed at each engine.
• Identify sections or pages of your site not indexed.
• Track your rankings for business critical keywords at major search engines.
• Measure how much traffic you are getting from each engine.
• Review the search phrases that are generating traffic from each.
• Determine which phrases generate the most conversion.

It may sound like a lot of work (it is), but you can’t help your site move forward until you know where it sits today.
From there, Derek shows users some best practices, explaining how text links are pretty and perfect, and JavaScript links are moderately evil, how footer links should be divided into two groups (SEO-based footer links and the required privacy law kind of stuff), the attractiveness of uncluttered URLs, and lots more good stuff. He also defines some of the HTTP status codes that, for some reason, I always have difficultly remembering for. For example:
200 OK - This page is okay. We’re ready to go. 301 Object Permanently Moved - This URL has permanently moved to another location. 302 Object Temporarily Moved - It’s a temporary moved. The engine may continue to index the redirecting URL, as well as the old one.
404 Error - Oops. Invalid or mistyped URL.
After talking about the stuff you should be doing, Derek then launches into conversation about what he calls The Circle of Death. These are the very, very bad things that site owners often mistakenly do much to their own demise.
Circle of Death actions include accidentally disallowing the search engines to index your site, making the engines accept cookies before entering, relying on some other kind of user dependant action, using tracking IDs or dynamic URLs, home page redirects and all sorts of other nasty spider traps.
Matt Bailey was last up and discussed the issues currently facing Target and takes attendees on a brief tour of common accessibility issues, like requiring users to perform an action before being allowed in (select a country/language), lack of alt attributes, image based Web sites
Tips for creating an accessible site:

• Create a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
• Offer a site map.
• Create and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your site.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content and links.
• Make sure your title and alt tags are descriptive and accurate.
• Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element.
• Avoid cluttered URLs - rewrite or redirect. Redirect links to the new URL.

Successful site architecture is the process of systematically satisfying the needs of search engines and the needs of your users. Learning to successfully architect your site for search engines and understanding how specific page elements and design technologies impact your ability to gain good organic listings with help your site rank well and stand out from your competition. Domain To begin with, you will need to choose a domain name for your new website. When choosing a domain name for your new online business, choose a short, easy to remember name; one that does not have a bunch of dashes,   you consider purchasing an expired domain name, check the history of the domain that you are considering because if it were previously banned for spamming, you could have problems later when trying to get indexed in the Yahoo!  Directory A good place to start your research on a domain is webarchive.com It is a great resource for researching old domain names and their past history. Directory Structure As a general rule, pages closest to the root directory are considered the most important pages on your Web site. The two most important documents that belong in the root directory are your home page, commonly named index.html, and the Robots Exclusion Protocol, commonly named robots.txt.
Generally, a standard, 100-page Web site should have the following subdirectory structure:
/cgi-bin
/css
/images
index.html
/logos
/pdf
robots.txt
/scripts
With this directory structure, the URL for your home page will look like the following:
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
Try and put the most important pages of your Web site at the root level. By using this strategy, you are communicating to both the search engines and site visitors that the most important pages on your site ARE important.
If you have a B2B Web site, the URL of the root level services page will look like the following:
http://www.yourdomain.com/services.html
As a general rule, I try to keep the first 200 pages at the root directory. That number is my personal preference. Other search engine marketers, Web developers, and usability experts might recommend different numbers. Ultimately, the Web site owner will determine what number is the most manageable for his company.
File Naming

Site navigation scheme Navigation Menus
Some site navigation schemes are more spider-friendly than others. For example, a set of navigation buttons is often more spider-friendly than a DHTML pull-down menu. And a set of hypertext links is often more spider-friendly than a set of navigation buttons. Does this mean that I recommend only using hypertext links for a Web site design? Absolutely not.
When developers and usability professionals create navigation schemes, they create them for use by site visitors. Visitors are the ones who will be spending thousands or millions of dollars on your products and services, not search engine spiders. Through focus groups and usability testing, developers can easily determine what types of navigation schemes visitors prefer - a text-based or graphics-based one. Quite often, visitors will not prefer one type of navigation scheme over the other.
However, in some industries, visitors show a marked preference for multimedia effects and pull-down menus. I find that visitors in the computer/software industries actually use pull-down menus, even though usability experts (such as Jared Spool and Jakob Nielsen) might not recommend them. In addition, as much as I love the power of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), they are often no substitute for graphic images. In order for visitors to view the same font (an unique set of type characters) designers use, visitors must also have the same font installed on their own individual computers. Otherwise, their browser will instead show a substitute font, which designers have no control over. Focus groups might determine that the target audience likes a particular font/typeface, one that is not commonly used. In this instance, I tend to create a set of (graphical) navigation buttons.