subject: Using Site Architecture To Improve SEO [print this page] Many times, a site gets very large and its ability to rank well in competitive markets decreases in part because of the size of the site. While we in the business know that content is king, more often than not it is a combination of content and effective site structure which will ultimately help your pages rank.
In this article I look at how to most effectively structure your site to take advantage of this.I'm not saying it is wrong in any way. In fact the tactic outlined will be very effective for a small to medium sized site, however I have also found another way to organize your site which can be more effective if done properly.
In the article, it explains how you use layers to organize your site. Now we're not talking about CSS layering or anything like that. It's more of a site structure issue than anything.
According to the article, one can layer their site through the use of sub-folders. By creating layers of sub-folders and then placing all related content within that sub-folder you can layer your site to help specific sections of it rank higher.
This is a great way to organize a smaller site because it allows you to place topical pages together, and promote links within the pages to help improve overall positioning of these sections.
Further, it helps reduce the dilution factor often felt by sites that attempt to cover multiple topics in a flat file structure.
For example, if you sell widgets you could organize the sections by some common element, such as color. That way your site could be:all blue widget pages would go into this sub-folder. You'd then organize all other sub-folders in a similar style.
Like I said, I think this is a very effective strategy for a smaller or medium site. There would be a much greater chance of blue widgets ranking highly in a structure like this.
However, I feel that for larger sites there's an even more effective way to organize your content.
Through the use of sub-domains one could further organize this content. This would make it even more relevant to search queries and more likely to rank. If one sold a larger variety of widgets yet still wanted to organize them by color then the structure of the site would be: and all site content relating to blue widgets would appear within this sub-domain.
The reason I say sub-domains would be more effective is because search engines tend to treat a sub-domain as its own site. In other words, a search engine sees
Keep in mind that such a strategy is of the most benefit to larger sites. If you don't have a large site, or don't foresee your site growing to become a large site then I wouldn't recommend the sub-domain layering tactic.
