Building A SEO Friendly Site
In order to gain the attention of the search engines, web publishers need to focus on a balanced structure for their website. Not only does a well structured site invite spiders, it allows for easy navigation. Let's take a look at how to create a directory structure:
Your site should be no deeper than four levels. This means that a visitor should never take more than three clicks to the homepage. Ideally, your site should be no deeper than three levels.
Your site should be no wider than eight sections. This means that no directory should contain more than eight sub directories underneath it.
The four levels would look something like this:
Level 1: Homepage http://www.yoursite.com/index.html
Level 2 Section www.yoursite.com/cheese.html
Level 3: Category www.yoursite.com/cheese/swiss-cheese.html
Level 4: Content www.yoursite.com/cheese/swiss/swiss-cheese-reviews.html
This form of organization is logical and allows both humans and search engines to understand at a glance the structure your site. It will also help your efforts in getting your pages ranked due to the repetition of keywords in your URLs. In the preceeding example, your Level 4 page would have the words "swiss" and "cheese" twice in the URL due to the structure of the site.
There are several pages that shouldn't be included in this directory structure. As a general rule, if the webpage concerns business information, like a Privacy Policy, Contact Us, pages that require a log in to access and other secure pages that aren't crawled by search engine spiders.
On a final note, you may have noticed that these pages end in .html. This is known as a static webpage (a webpage whose URL never changes) and will generally rank better in the search engines than dynamic pages that use characters such as "?" or "%" in the URL.
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