Hello again, in this lesson we'll look at site architecture issues. These are areas within your team's control that greatly influence not only how the bots navigate your site, but use your navigation as well. These include items like broken links, no followed tagging and content redirecting. By looking at website performance analysis tools and backlinking tools, you will gain a deeper understanding of site architecture and linking improvements you can make. What you'll learn is how to understand what site architecture improvements have the most impact on your SEO performance, and the knowledge of why these improvements matter, and how to make them. Fixing site architecture issues is another important element of tech SEO. Architecture issues relate to how the site is laid out, overall linking and how bots or human visitors interpret what the full domain in URLs represent. I'm going to share some of the tools that will help you get started in this area. These website performance analysis tools can compliment the other tools we covered. Lipperhey analyzes your site for technical and SEO aspects then produces a report. Site Analyzer is helpful for running tests and putting those tests into a clear analysis you can use with clients or stakeholders. And the Webbee SEO spider tool is another way to get site architecture data. You also may want to take a look at some backlink analysis tools, like MOZ's Open Site Explorer or Majestic's SEO link index database. Citation Labs has a broken link finder. AHREFS is great for analyzing which content gets the most shares and backlinks, and you can actually compare one URL against another in terms of link authority or page authority. Cognitive SEO gives a full audit of backlinks by crawling and analyzing backlink data. LinkResearchTools helps you understand link velocity trends and redirect tracing. And finally OpenLinkProfiler gives you a link influence score to show the strength of your pages and helps you update and refresh backlinks. These should be added to your toolbox. In and of themselves, these will only work as much as you make use of the data and put that into practice. However, using some of these tools for backlink analysis, internal and external links can give you a clear indication of where to prioritize the type of site architecture changes you might make. The backlink explorer plugin in Firefox is another great way to get all the backlinks of your website and help you understand the anchor text, the internal and external linking, and what kind of updates you might make to the site. You might assume that finding and fixing broken links is the place to start. If so, you'd be right. Broken links can wreak havoc on the domain's overall performance. Broken links portray your website's quality to the search engines as less than it actually is. Remember, quality is determined for tech SEO by how well site architecture is set up. It's worthwhile to show the highest quality of your domain to the search engines. Now you can't fix every broken link. This depends on resources and priority, but identifying broken links is a great way to make improvements. This is especially true of internal links. Those pointing to key pages that have not been redirected directly, or those leading to 404's, and connecting the link equity and value that you want to pass between URLs. Refreshing your no follow tagging strategies is related to linking. Ideally, you're providing a broad understanding of the search bots of what your domain is about. In limiting the Nofollow tagging just to those pages that truly justify not being followed. Many people employed practices to try to sculpt page rank or change the domain flow. This requires an advanced and more nuanced understanding of the other risks involved. It is generally not recommended. So I suggest you use Nofollow very sparingly. If you choose to modify, I recommend using the robots.txt file. There you have a little bit more master control around the kind of indexing or following that occurs to the sites on your domain. When it comes to content redirecting, you should look to redirect to the most theme relevant page. When I say theme relevant, that means the most similar next best content from the one that you're removing. If you don't map content correctly between redirects across relevant themes, you can negatively impact what that site represents. So, think through how you redirect content. This is especially true if you acquire a new domain or decide to end-of-life a subdomain, or a vanity domain or a smaller website you maintain and you want to incorporate that back into a primary domain you're running. For instance, if your page is about ABC and the next page linking to it is XYZ, and your current ABC page goes away, you should take that link from page XYZ and point it to a page that looks very similar to that prior one. Not doing so can negatively impact the user experience by not giving users the optimal page where they should arrive and convert effectively. It can also deteriorate the key words you're ranking for. The relevance goes down when the matching of content diminishes. Ultimately thinking through content redirecting and the impact this has on site architecture and linking is worth doing the right way.
