SEO Directory Structures and Navigation

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When designing or re-designing a website the websites navigational structure should be given some thought as it can have and help improve longtail keyword search and aid you SEO campaign.

The websites directory structure should be as simple as possible, and the directories should not appear to be nested in multiple levels of other directories, Google prioritises and crawls pages based on folder levels, so pages nested in multiple levels of directories can be difficult to find, get crawled and indexed.

Keeping pages on the root directory is the best solution, as it is seen as being more important, then a web page nested in a folder or sub-folder.

However this is not always possible, especially with some ecommerce websites, where products are organised in categories and brands and sub-categories and sub-brands. For these situations, there are two different types of directory structures available to use:

1) Flat directory structure – ideal for smaller website, giving equal weight to all internal pages, the problem here is when the site eventually grows not all pages are equal and the file structure needs to reflect this.

2) Vertical directory structure – ideal for larger websites, giving more weight to top level category pages, the problem here is the lowest level pages are too far away to users and search engines to find.

No matter what directory structure you adopt the crawlers will eventually find internal pages if linked to correctly and often, however you are not helping the crawler achieve its objective of crawling and indexing all the website pages.

The ideal solution is to change the websites navigation, so that all low level pages are reachable within 2 clicks from the homepage, thus having a healthy combination of both the flat and vertical directory structure.

SEO Advisor
Vipul

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SEO Directory Structures and Navigation

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