Poor site structure generally occurs in ecommerce websites when the site navigation
makes it extremely difficult for search engine spiders to find the products page of the site. Most of the typical ecommerce website designs tend to use a category and sub-category system that helps the visitors to browse through the site by narrowing down their options until they find just what they are looking for. The flaw in this system arises when a search engine spider is required too deep into a site to find the product pages.
But how does one know when crawlers are traveling in too deep?
The first indicator is the Page Rank scoring of the page. You can find the Page Ranke score of just about any page by just visiting the page with the Google Toolbar that is installed on your browser. Pages that arent very deep generally have a Page Rank score. However, there are many factors that could cause a page not to have a Page Rank score, so dont just rely on this indicator. The best way to find out if a page is too deep is to first count how many pages you will have to visit before you get to the product page. If it is more than 3 web pages, then it is very deep for a search engine crawler to find.
So how can one correct poor site structure?
The best way to correct poor site structure is to not make your product pages more than 3 pages deep. But this isnt always as easy as it seems. Many website come replete with millions of products and creating a site structure that consists of just one level of categories and then products would ensure thousands of links for the product pages. This is where you need to plan carefully.
Make sure the main navigation is coded with SEO-friendly CSS so you can even include expanding sub-navigation menus.
Put in featured product links on the home page as well as the main category pages to promote indexing of all the popular products.
Use articles, blogs and buyers guides to link to certain product pages.
Add a bookmarking widget to your product pages so they can be easily shred on social networking sites.