Site Structure
By structure here we mean the physical layout and groupings of your pages
as evidenced by the URLs that lead to them. Note that this is entirely
independant of navigational structure. Later we'll deal with those navigational
structures that provide access to these pages, but here we look at some
even more basic considerations.
Page Location
Every page in your site has a unique address. This address starts with the domain name
and then identifies the path to the unique page within your site. For example,
if this was a music related site, it might contain the following page:
http://www.SEOKnowHow.com/artists/folk/modern/bob_dylan.html
The Search Engines make several decisions based upon the URLs that make up
your site. Some of these are covered in the On Page SEO section, but for now
what interestes us is the path section of this URL. The path is everything
between the domain and the page name.
i.e. /artists/folk/modern/
In SEO terms, this is a weak path. It is weak because, to the crawler, it
looks like this page is a long way (3 directories) from the homepage (www.SEOKnowHow.com).
Pages that are a long way from the homepage like this are described as deep.The
crawler assumes that deep pages are less important than those nearer to the
hmeopage.
Keep Important Pages Close to Home
An identical page located at http://www.seoknowhow.com/bob_dylan.html
would almost certainly rank more highly.
Exception - An example of a case in which
this might not be true is when a user searches on the keyphrase "bob dylan
folk". In this case the occurrence of the keyword "folk" in the path might
improve the page's ranking for that phrase. This type of behavior, and
many others - are covered in more detail in the On Page SEO section.
OK, so the lesson to take away from this is that, although a tidy
directory structure can make implementation and maintenance easier, they
are not always a good idea from an SEO point of view.
General Rule of Thumb
For Small Sites (< 200 pages) - keep everything in
the domain directory. In other words, every page on your site will have a URL
of the form http://myDomain/myPage.html
For larger sites - keep the pages you are tergetting for SEO
in the domain directory. Other pages may be built out as necessary.
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