Hierarchical Web Site Structure

We’ve dealt with small sites, now lets consider larger sites. There are a lot of ecommerce sites about selling hundreds and even thousands of products. Most have a hierarchical navigation system where the home page links to the most important department type pages (listing multiple products) which then link to individual products.

You might have a site with 30 department pages (linked from every page of the site via the menu) each listing ~20 products each, which then links to those 20 individual product pages. With this example we’d have roughly a 600 page website. The above would be a very good structure for that type of site, not an excessive number of links per page and those very important department pages get 600 links each since every page links to them. But how far can this model be stretched, how many pages? It depends on numerous factors including the sites design/look, how many department type pages there are how many products there are. Take a look at The Business Software Bin which sells Amazon business software (it’s an affiliate site). The menu on the left has about 50 links on it. Take a look at a department page like e-Commerce Software or Web Browsers and you can see it lists 10 products and the left menu isn’t longer than the list of products (it looks OK). So for this site 50 department links from every page works. We have sites using the same design with over 70 links on the menu (others have less than 50), beyond that and it doesn’t look so good! Other sites will be limited by their design and so you might not be able to get the number of links on the menu you’d like or you might have a really large site with hundreds of department type pages. In these cases you’ll need to build smaller webs of pages. so lets look at a an enormous site like Amazon. Amazon has millions of products for sale over tens of thousands of what we are calling department pages. There is no way it could have all the department pages on one menu!! What Amazon has done instead is break it’s inventory up into related sections (31 of them currently). Each section is like a site in itself with a link to the main 31 sections. So there’s a Book section, Software section etc… By breaking the site up this way they have been able to keep the basic hierarchical navigation structure for each section where the main page links to the important department pages which in turn link to deep product pages.

 Keep hard work

Regards

Rohit Mehra

Organize your Website into Sections

To decide how to organize directory structure take a look at your sites content, can it be broken down into various sections based on helpful keywords?

If it can you should since the keywords within a directory name (if done correctly) can help a pages SERPs. For example all of the SEO Tutorial pages are within the directory “seo-tutorial”; http://www.rohitseo.wordpress.com. They will all benefit from the keywords tutorial and seo since the major search engines take the domain name, directory and file names into account. If you haven’t already read the section Why Hyphenated Domain Names you might want to take a look now. In summary when naming directories etc… use hyphens (-) not underscores (_) or multiple words together (seotutorial would NOT make a good SEO friendly directory or filename, seo-tutorial is better). So by putting your pages in the right directory you give them a small boost without even trying. File names work the same way, which is why we use descriptive file names where possible like http://www.rohitseo.wordpress.com for this page. So this page will be given a small boost for the following words from the domain, directory and file name (seo tutorial web site optimization). Remember use hyphens (-) as a separator not underscores (_) since the latter is not a word separator to the search engines.

Quick SEO Tip – when deciding on directory names either use single words or multiple words (like the /seo-tutorial/web-site-optimization/ example above) separated by hyphens (-), do not use underscores (_) (i.e. http://www.rohitseo.wordpress.com is good www.rohitseo.wordpress.com/rohit_seotutorialsis bad). See Choosing a Business and Domain Name for further details.

Rohit Mehra

Web Site Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is broadly broken down into two parts. The first and the area you as a web site owner have most control over is on site optimization which covers everything you can do to a web sites content, domain name choice, directory structure, internal link structure, anchor text of internal links etc… The second part covers links to your website, PageRank (PR) acquisition, anchor text of external links, reciprocal link exchanges etc…

In this section of our SEO Tutorial we’ll broadly introduce on site optimization, how to optimize your web site for better search engine rankings with good Google rankings our primary goal.

Regards

Rohit Mehra