URL structure can be the making or breaking of a website. Some form of SEO can be found everywhere, whether it be what you call your files or where you position a file on a server, getting all of this correct is essential.

Why is it important?

URL structure is important for SEO due to the fact that not only do search engines look at the URL, but humans use it too. If I was to visit a website that had an ‘About SEO’ web page, I’d be much more likely to remember it or bookmark it if it was called: www.seocompany.com/about-seo, instead of www.seocompany.com/page3756.

There is no description within the second example URL which would definitely put someone off. One more point to make on this is if someone has visited and logs off their machine then wishes to revisit the page there is a good chance they will have a look in their history. If you use short, descriptive names then they can easily find it. If using ‘page3756′ they will not have a clue what it is and in most cases ignore it.

The next point to make is use short names. This is for both human and search engine. A search engine only looks at a certain number of characters therefore large URL’s should not be used from an SEO perspective.

For example:

www.companyname.com/this-is-the-first-level/second-level/file-name-etc.html

may be indexed but the search engine may have only ‘looked’ at these characters:

www.companyname.com/this-is-the-first-level/second

Keeping filenames, thus the URL short is essential and goes hand in hand with any other SEO technique employed on a website.

Hyphens vs Underscore

When separating filenames always use a hyphen. This is due to the search engines seeing a hyphened word as two separate words instead of the one. You wouldn’t type in ‘post_office’, you would type in ‘post office’.

Summary

Understand how humans and search engines work and name your files and structure your Url and website to coincide. Everything has an impact in SEO, even the smallest details.

In the last SEO Manual article we talked about the advantages of good site structure, in this article we are going to be talking about the disadvantages of a bad site structure. When owning a website having a bad site structure could have a very negative effect both on your sales through your website or maybe even just the amount of hits you get. It may even have a bad effect on the usability of the site.

For a web developer walking into a project which has a bad structure can be a nightmare, whether it is the previous developers coding standards or even if it’s just the way they have their files. Having a bad site structure when developing the website can greatly affect efficiency in editing the site, adding to the site or just general maintenance. The reason it could be bad for the developer is they may not know where things are, they may have to start at the beginning of the script and go through it line by line while they figure out what each bit does, then they have to find the bit that relates to what they are doing before finally finding the piece of code they need to change. Of course the developer who created the code is more than likely to understand every bit and no straight away the bit they need to edit. But like in all businesses the previous developer may not still work there; he may not even be contactable, which will just make it more frustrating. For these reasons I would always try to organise my code well enough so others can read it relatively well. Commenting code could also be a great help when passing complex projects on to others, your comments can simplify the routine for the new developer.

When it comes to the visitors point of view having a bad site structure is a major concern. If they can’t find what they are looking for they will simply turn back to the search results and try the next link down, which will definitely prevent further sales from that person. As they are more than likely to skip past your site next time they search.

From a search engine crawlers point of view having a bad site structure is extremely bad practice, if the search engines crawler can’t navigate through your site, you are very unlikely to even get listed for your keywords, and you will likely spend a lot of money trying to figure out why you aren’t being listed. This could be a number of things from bad navigation layout, JavaScript navigation or a missing XML sitemap. When it comes to JavaScript navigation, I refer to the types of JavaScript navigation that is totally generated by the JavaScript and using minimal HTML to wrap the JavaScript in. The reason you should try and steer clear of JavaScript navigation is a lot of old browsers are incompatible with most of today’s JavaScript menu systems. Also search engines crawlers will not run the JavaScript so the crawler will just see a blank space where the navigation should be. Non of todays search engine crawlers don’t know enough about JavaScript to be able to run it and then use the output. There are always alternates to JavaScripts like for example you could use a CSS list based menu which will create the same effect and will be more search engine friendly. Having a missing XML sitemap could prevent the search engine crawler from finding important pages on your website, further more preventing your website from being ranked for them pages.

I hope this article is found to be useful to anyone who reads it. This article should give you enough reasons to structure your site well, from navigation to the way you organise your code remember site structure is key if you want to be ranked.