When we refer to the term architect, many get the impression of designing and planning and this is exactly what architects do. Right now though, you will become your own blog seo architect and learn about desigining the layout of your blog in order to have a smart and search engine efficient blog.

It may not seem much as you might realize blogs have nothing more than a front page, several other pages, and posts, but what you may not realize is not linking to these effectively will drastically reduce your blog’s search engine rankings.

To architect your blog, you need good internal linking. Internal linking is links on your blog that link to other parts of your blog or site. Good internal linking structures allow search engines to create a good “visual” of your website which will then allow them to provide better service for users and you. Here are some ways to get this done:

Sitemaps: Sitemaps essentially layout what your site looks like and does not force search engines to guess where or what content you have. For Wordpress purposes, install the Google XML Sitemap plugin that I talked about in this post. That will help you set up and configure how often your posts, pages, categories and other links are crawled by search engines.

Sitemaps make it easier for bots to crawl your site and you will see your optimization results in a matter of days instead of months. While external links play an important role on link popularity, so does your sitemap. Your internal links point to your content and help it rise in ranks whether it be in pagerank or link popularity.

For those who wish to make manual sitemaps, be sure to submit them into major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc. Telling where your sitemap is works much better than forcing search engine bots to guess.

Cross-Linking Navigation Structure – This is the small navigation bar you see on top of sites that looks something like this:

Home >> Your Category >> Your Post Title

This is really useful to do in your blog as well, and there is a plugin for that as I mentioned in my earlier post that does this.

TIP: Structure your breadcrumb bar opposite of my example so that it will be something like this;

Your Post Title >> Your Category >> Home

Setting your post title first will tell search engines that it has more importance than the text after it which in our case is a good thing.

URL Structure – Url structure is as equally (if not more) important as the above factors to developing a good website structure, and as I covered briefly in my beginning posts, it is important to have URLs that are “search engine friendly”.

What do I mean by that?

Search engine friendly urls are those that contain specific keywords, no query characters and are easy to type in. In order for this to happen, I suggested go into the Admin Panel –>Settings–>Permalinks and choose ‘Custom Structure’ and enter /%postname%/

That should set your post and page urls to their titles. Some people choose to add a category name before the post name, but I find that frustrating because if you change your category name, you will a)have a lot of 404 pages (page not found errors), b) you’ll need a really good plugin to redirect to the new pages, and c) your search engine rankings will drop.

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