January 23, 2009 | By Kenneth Koh |

What is the best website structure that is ideal for search engine optimisation?

To answer this question, let’s look at the 2 types of website structures.
1) Flat website structure
In a flat structure, all the files are in the root folder.
For example,
yourwebsite.com/article1.htm
yourwebsite.com/article2.htm
yourwebsite.com/article3.htm
yourwebsite.com/article4.htm
yourwebsite.com/article5.htm
yourwebsite.com/article6.htm
2) Directory website structure
In a directory structure, the files are categorized into different folders/directory.
For example,
yourwebsite.com/cause/article1.htm
yourwebsite.com/cause/article2.htm
yourwebsite.com/treatment/article3.htm
yourwebsite.com/treatment/article4.htm
yourwebsite.com/prevention/article5.htm
yourwebsite.com/prevention/article6.htm
where article 1 and 2 are related to the cause of the illness (say we’re building a website about headache), article 3 and 4 are related to the treatment methods and article 5 and 6 are related to the prevention measures.
The question is, which website structure is better? Is it the flat website structure? Or the directory website structure?
Some SEO gurus say that directory structure is better. But from experience, I don’t see much difference.
On the contrary, I realize that flat website structure seems to be indexed faster by the search engines.
Another Aspect Of Website Structure
There is another aspect of website structure that is worth discussing. It is the way you link your articles.
If you have 5 articles on headache treatment, you should link all the 5 articles together. This will increase the relevancy of the webpage and thus improve its search engine ranking.
But good internal linking can be practised regardless of which website structure you use.
My Preferred Website Structure
I’ve built content websites using both flat and directory site structure. Personally, I prefer to use a flat website structure.
Reason? There are less potential problems.
For example,
1) I don’t have to worry about whether to use /, ./ or ../ when doing internal linking.
2) When promoting the website, I don’t have to worry that I may make a mistake in the url, since in a flat structure, all the urls have the same format of website.com/articleXX.htm.
My Advice On Website Structure
In conclusion, my advice is to use a flat website structure and link related articles together. This combination should be enough for search engine optimization. After all, website structure is just a small part in the entire SEO puzzle. What’s more important is backlinks and keyword analysis

Topics: Keyword Analysis |

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