Website Structure

The way a site is structured can have a major bearing for good or ill on how it gets indexed and ranked, particularly so with Google.

It's not simply a question of avoiding search engine "unfriendly" site structures such as Flash or Frames or even ensuring the CMS/shopping cart has been properly "tweaked" to eliminate problem Urls, site architecture and particularly the way internal linkage is structured can give internal pages a major ranking boost.

My favoured structure is the "theme pyramid" as used on this site.

The subject area is first divided into its major components formatted as directories and using relevant keywords whenever possible, these are then sub-divided into component pages that again use relevant keywords.

You end up with a page on "SEO tutorials" with the file path of "www.diy-seo.com/search-engine-optimization-resources/seo_tutorials.html" and with half a dozen links from the resources directory that use "SEO tutorials" as the anchor text.

For inner pages that may never see an outside link those internal links with the "correct" link text are a major help to having them rank.

Depth can be a problem, in theory every step from the root looses one PR point so ideally your innermost pages should be no more than 3/4 clicks from the home page, this is more to ensure the pages get spidered/indexed than for ranking purposes.

For further reading on site structure we recommend: