The HTML structure of a website is an extremely important area for website development, as without correct structure the website will not build the internal authority at its potential. Many web developers work on the basis of get the project out and looking right - usually severly letting the client down.

Through writing this chapter, I am going give you insights into how your websites structure should be, and more importantly how it shouldn’t be. If you think of a website with average HTML site structure as starting at 3. I will give you an idea of how different types of url structure can give benefit or negative effect below:

• querystring based: These are URL’s which include the ? sign. Usually index.php?mod=1&pageid=3&catid=4 and are very easy to manipulate to create seperate urls, for example the following URL would retrieve the exact same page, with a different url: index.php?pageid=3&mod=1&catid=4. Therefore this has to be ranked as 0 for effective search engine marketing
• Static HTML site: This is a website created with a piece of software only, with filenames given by the web developer, and all interlinked manually. These sites usually can have problems with broken links, addresses with invalid characters in them (the space is a good example) or other areas in need of improvement. They would be ranked as a baseline 3.
• URL Rewriten addresses: This website is one such example of a website built with rewritten URL’s, an effective rewrite will emulate the static HTML site, but without the issues raised with broken url’s, as there is usually a underlying CMS building the links on the fly, ensuring when you delete a page, the link to it gets deleted as well. If the structure of the URL is optimised, it can be very informative to the end user, whilst providing maximum search engine optimisation. Therefore it would have a ranking of between 4 and 10, as it is all down to the web developers end skill in implementing it effectively.

In this section i have given three examples, of how you can use the URL to build a structure of a site, Looking around the web at websites which rank well will give you ideas of how you should build the HTML stucture, but as a reference, I would recommend using category/subcategory/pagename.html as a basis moving forward, exactly as a static site would use, but without any downfalls associated with static websites

Related posts:

1. Disadvantages of bad site structure?
2. Site Structure - Introduction
3. URL Structure - What is it?
4. What is Site Structure?
5. Site Folder Structure