Site Structure for SEO (Part 2b of 5)
This is post is part of a 5 part SEO help series, providing introductory help in learning about search engine optimisations.
What is Site Structure?
Site structure is the way that the content is organised into folders in the back-end of your site. This structure is displayed in the address of the content too, e.g.
http://www.examplesite.com/folder1/content1.html
Why is Site Structure important for Search Engine Optimisation?
It is important to consider what content is stored in what folders. The closer this information relates to one and other helps the search engine to understand the content on your site and how it relates to each other...this therefore allows it to understand the relevancy of content on your site to search queries. The content can relate in different ways though, e.g. the topic or the nature of the content, e.g:
- By Topic: Cats, Dogs, Rabbits, Fish, Wombats
- By Content Type: Informational/Advice, Ecommerce, Company Information, Images, Videos, Code
Site Depth & Folder Organisation
It is good practice to not over-do the number of folders your content in, as it is best practive to keep content (especially the content you most want to rank) close to the root.
E.g. don't do this:
http://www.examplesite.com/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/content1.html
Instead, do this:
http://www.examplesite.com/folder1/content1.html
How you make this decision depends on the query type that you might expect from a search engine user or your prospective visitors (we will go on to discuss keyword research in the following post). For instance if they are frequently making queries by media type then the second option might be advisable or alternatively if they are making topic searches then you might want to combine the two but this will mean that your content is further away from the root...there are four alternatives:
Example 1:
http://www.petsite.com/cats/videos.html
http://www.petsite.com/cats/information.html
...video files and helpsheets mixed into the same topic folder.
Example 2:
http://www.petsite.com/cats/helpsheets/felines.html
http://www.petsite.com/cats/videos/felines.html
...separate folders for text helpsheets and videos, but sharing the first-tier folder (cats).
Example 3:
http://www.petsite.com/helpsheets/cats.html
http://www.petsite.com/videos/cats.html
...separate folders for information type and so topic type is separate.
Example 4:
http://www.petsite.com/cat-videos.html
http://www.petsite.com/cat-helsheets.html
Without doing keyword research and reviewing the current structure of your sites content it's difficult to say which would be most suitable, but if you have something other than this and unsure what is the way ahead, feel free to get in touch.
The general rule though is try to keep the most important content closer to the root of the website than deeply embedded in several folders.
Posted By: Ben
22 January 2009