Website Search Engine Optimisation - Organising Files & Folders When Developing A Website. A Beginners Guide by Brian Cotsen

We are going to step away from the actual web page for a moment and consider the overall organisation of your website.

Like an office, your website will be organsied into sections - Folders, Files and individual documents.

Search Engines need to find all of the web pages on your website so you want them to be able to find all of the folders, files and individual documents.

So let's take a quick look at how best to plan the organisation of your website structure to maximise your SEO.

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What are files & folders?

To the left we can see the entire site structure of Abode Design.

Being quite a small website with just 6 pages it is very easy to show all the files that make this site work.

None the less, big or small, any website needs to have a structure and folder organisation.

This is not just so that the web developer can find files when he or she needs to make adjustments, it is also so that when the search engines send out a spider to crawl your web pages, they can easily find all of them, the deeper the site structure, the less likely they are to fully crawl your website regularly.

A deep site structure need not necessarily cause trouble but make sure that all of the pages held within each folder are linked using simple html text links (see Navigation & Links and Search Engine Optimisation).

One of the main issues with deep site structures is the danger of moving files from one folder to another but not fully updating your navigation links.

 

Get it wrong and not only your human visitors but the web spiders won't be able to find those pages either. If they can't read the pages then they can't index them which means that they can't return them in the search results.

Here we can see the different levels of folders and files that make up Abode Design.

1. Is the Top Level Folder that contains all of the subsequent folders & files for the website. It is also known as the root folder.

2. Shows two further folders. The image folder contains the individual image files where as the second folder a little above the image folder is 3 levels deep within the website structure.

3. Show an individual file that will be displayed on the website, if a page containing that image is called up.

 

One reason I like to keep the levels pretty shallow within my site organisation is so that when search results are displayed, they are easy to read and understand by humans scanning the page of results.

Take the example below from one of my early websites, with 4 or 5 layers

This file was buried 4 levels into the site structure, if you look at the green text you can see how confusing it is for the human eye to make any sense of it.

Now compare that with this result from Simple Website Marketing

Here my web page listing my consultation services is just 1 level in from the root address. It's easy to read the line of text and easy for the web spiders to find the page and crawl it.

Lets continue our look at the factors that effect SEO by discussing how Navigation on your website effects Search Engine Optimisation.

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