Structuring a site can have some effects on your website actually pretty large effects if you have a larger website. You could lose some pretty big dips if you don’t have your website structured properly such as inner links (inner folders), and etc. I know there is some site structures we need to work on on our website which its not a really big problem, but we just like to make sure we do things 200 percent right.

Url Structure and File / Folder Names

When structuring a site always use your keywords in for your page filenames, and try to put as many pages in your doc_root folder which would be your main folder of your website. Now if your needing to organize things and put different files in different folders make sure you use your keywords in the folder names, and don’t have everything spaced out so far. When I say spaced out I mean don’t have this type of structure like website/design/design2/design/website.html that will just kill your page rank flow try to have something like this website-design/website-design.html now thats a nice site structure with a keyword rich layout.

Give that a try for your urls and browse through your site and just see what type of adjustments you need to make. Little things like this can have a effect on your website and your rankings specially your long tail keywords. Thats why its very important to optimize your blog structure very well.

Session Ids and URL’s

Be advised to remove all sessions urls and put them into a more friendly url for example.

Wrong Method Below

http://www.dewitttsmedia.com/seo-blogs/post-34234.php

Correct Method Below

http://www.dewittsmedia.com/seo-blogs/how-to-optimize-a-url.php

The 2nd url was using the title of the webpage, the 1st url was just using a id number. You want to make sure that your urls are optimized to the title of the web page, or something that has your keywords in the  url. if you check out SEO Consultants Rewriting your URL you can learn more about url rewriting and implementing the strategies.

Linking

Always make sure your website is linking out to all your other pages such as your home page going to all your inner pages. Reason being is because your page rank will get flowed into the other pages you don’t want to have a great page where it could not be seen, or page rank is not passing to it. I’ve seen this happen on several occasions.

Conclusion

There is several things that apply to SEO, such as inbound links, site structure, on site optimization, and etc.  Every little bit and piece can make up for your rankings, but a big majority of your rankings is due to your inbound link profile in other words nothing can rank you better and higher then having great links. I have dealt with clients that seem to think when optimizing there website it might help them maybe to a degree, but when there optimizing there trying to optimize for competitive key terms and there is no way they will rank unless they purchase text links, or obtain them through viral content.

Related Resrouces 

SEO - File Naming Structure in URLS 
Site Structure - Beanstalk INC 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 9:51 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.