July 11, 2007

Typo3 CMS SEO (Part 9): Site Organization

Part nine of a ten part series: Typo3 SEO

According to SEO expert, Aaron Wall (posting on SEOMOZ.org): "Clear organization not only helps search engines understand how documents relate to each other, but also effectivley distributes your link authority." Makes sense, really. Why? Because quality information architecture has everything to do with content. The place of your page in its local community can tell users (including search engines) a lot about who it is and who it belongs to.

Yet information architecture is one of the most overlooked strategies of SEO because keeping up with a site's linking structure is hard to do - especially when you're dealing with a massive amount of pages. Well, never fear, Typo3 is here. With Typo3, achieving quality site organization is really a piece of cake!

Here's how. Take a look at what I'm looking at right now as I type. On the left column, I'm looking at my page tree - which is simply a visual representation of every page in my site - which level their on, whether they're hidden or not, whether they are redirects or simply normal pages, whether they're external redirects, etc. I've seen a lot of CMS's in my time, yet have not come across a single one that comes close to this:

Simply brilliant! With Typo3 CMS, at any time, if I want to re-organize massive sections of my site, I can do this in a matter of seconds - simply by drag and drop. And Typo3 handles updating all the links, and making sure that all the redirects are working properly (if you're using RealURL). I can add/edit/delete/rename any time with the click of the mouse - always knowing that any updates will be reflected on the front-end interface. Nice, huh?

Honestly, there's not much more to say about this SEO ranking factor, since Typo3 handles it with such ease. Typo3 takes care of the complex technical work, and leaves the more important information architecture to you.