Information is the lifeblood of SEO. The more you know about a site you are working on, the better you will perform. Earlier this week, we looked at the most basic tools SEOs use and the steps they take when gathering information about a website they are working on.

Today, I wanted to write about how to figure out a site’s link and site structures. Both provide critical information to SEOs as they mentally outline their campaign techniques.

Standing in the Footprint of Backlinks

Links are the arteries of the web. Search engines tend to use links as a way to gauge the interest in and relative importance of websites. Theoretically, the more links a particular site has directed towards it, the better that site is in the eyes of the engines. Realistically, not all links are created equal and the way links are cultivated or pursued can have a direct effect on how the overall site is perceived by the search engines.
Your “link footprint” is somewhat like a fingerprint. Each website has a unique footprint that tells search engines a great deal about the relevance, seriousness and intent of websites in their indexes. The link footprint is tracked over time and helps provide the search engines a historic overview of the life-span of each site. Google and Yahoo! are both directly influenced by current and historic information drawn from links.

If a site has always had good policy of providing useful, relevant links for its users AND has a number of highly relevant links directed towards it from complementary websites, it will likely do well in the rankings. If a site has a history of using any number of link building techniques with an obvious aim at deceiving or manipulating search rankings, it will likely be relatively sluggish in rankings.

The fastest way to get a quick glimpse at what Google sees when looking at backlinks directed to a site is to use the link:http://www.metamend.com operator. This shows (and lists) how many sites Google sees linking to that domain. (note, Google filters out sites it deems old or irrelevant from the list of displayed sites)
There are several automated tools that will give you a good sense which sites link to your website and which link to yours. A popular free tool found in the Webmaster Tools section of SiteProNews.com is called BackLinks Master. Though it takes between 15 – 20 minutes to analyze link directed towards a URL, the software identifies:

- backlinks pointing to a site
- direct links and java script links
- links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN
- Anchor text (and link types)

Architectree

A website should be constructed logically with the INDEX or HOME page being the foundation. Many webmasters visualize the architecture of a website as a tree, hence the heading title. Important sections of a site each have an INDEX page which in turn uses links to direct visitors to more specific pages which might also use links to direct visitors even deeper into the site. Getting a sense of how that internal link path is structured is critical to figuring out how to best draw search spiders through the entire website.
A quick visit to the site’s host server is by far the fastest way to check out the site’s structure however many larger companies don’t allow third-party vendors access to their servers.

The fastest way to see all the internally linked documents Google perceives in its index is to use the allinurl:http://www.metamend.com operator. This shows and displays all links that come from the specific URL entered in the query.

If the site structure makes logical sense to the SEO at first or second glance, it likely makes logical sense to the search engines. If, however, a site’s structure doesn’t make sense at all, the SEO knows he or she needs to plan for some extra work and research time.

OK. next time we’ll look at keyword selection.