Without search engine-friendly architecture, the SEO efforts on your site will have limited success. You may not know it when the shape and design of your site is affecting your ranking, although the clues are there. You just need to know what to look for.

A good SEO firm will provide an assessment of your site’s architecture in the initial SEO analysis for your site. This will help you to identify any problem areas. If you don’t want any nasty surprises when you approach a search engine optimisation company, however, it’s a good idea to spot architecture mistakes before they have any effect.

1. Flash and JavaScript for navigation. These technologies don’t just mess up your pages, they mess up navigation through your site as well, at least for the moment. Google has been trying to improve its relationship with these technologies for years, so far with limited success. Things may change in the future, but for the present it is best to either cut Flash and JavaScript out of your navigation areas, or provide equally prominent text-based navigation.

2. Not sticking with static. You may have heard of the major inconvenience dynamic URLs present for SEO. Pages with parameter strings are simply not search engine-friendly. A static URL will get indexed more quickly and provides more room for your keywords.

3. Diminishing internal links. Links have a major importance to SEO. Your SEO consultant will spend a lot of time trying to net you some good inbound links, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about how this is done. What is often forgotten is that your internal links count toward your ranking as well, and are much easier to get to. Your site’s architecture plan should take the methods of navigation into account, providing good places for keyword-anchored links. Once you’ve mapped out your architecture, it’s a good idea to think about places for links within content as well.

4. Uber-complex site structure. It sounds a little counter-intuitive, but flat architecture is good news for SEO. Thinning out the number of levels in your site’s structure means that every page will be as few clicks to the home page as possible. This is good news on the SEO front, as the search engines are known not to plunge too deep into a site. It’s also good news in terms of your site’s users, who are likely to give up if information is more than a couple of clicks away.

5. No sitemap. Sitemaps tell people where to go. A well-planned site map can be a great support for your overall SEO. An XML Sitemap is also essential when you want your paths to be clear to the search engines.

Mistakes are made all the time. Even when a site has kept SEO in mind in the design stages, compromises are inevitably made that will affect your SEO down the line. There will always be things that get in the way, but knowledge of the most common mistakes can help you to avoid them.

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