Site structures and SEO

Site structure

With theming and latent semantics being a very important part of SEO, site structure needs to be high on the priority list to accurately target keywords and to increase quality conversions. Website owners needs to understand this as they are often responsible for the planning of the site structure. It is best to plan the site structure with the assistance of an SEO specialist as the SEO specialist can best identify the importance and relevance of certain pages to one another and the effect it might have on the theming of the different sections of the website.

Pyramid

With the internal structure of a website it is important to be able to plan the site in a pyramid structure. The structure consist out of main sections that needs be perfectly differentiated in order to form niche themes. The objective is to guide the search engine into understanding how each subject relates to one another. The end result should be to be able to easily target different variations of a keyword whilst amplifying the theme towards the upper levels of each main section. For this purpose we will discuss 2 types of pyramid structures.

Flat structure

This form of site structure often has only 2 or maximum 3 levels but consist out of 100's of pages. The spider will index the site but will lack the ability to index deep into the site as there is no depth. There are many negatives including usability issues to this type of site structure, but we will only discuss 2.

• The internal pages create a theme for the entire site. Every level the site goes deeper the theme is specified and the keywords are much better targeted by the internal pages amplifying the theme towards the upper levels. A flat structure has allot of individual pages that lacks the power of sub pages to amplify its theme and targeting of niche keywords.

• Page rank from deep links is increased as it links up towards the home page and the value of PageRank towards the importance of the page being linked to is extremely high.

High-rise structure

The high-rise structure has many levels sometimes as deep as six or more levels. These type of structures are mostly seen in portal sites such as Yahoo!, about and MSN but also directories like Dmoz. The benefit of these structures are better usability from the visitor's perspective but also makes it easier to increase the PageRank of the higher levels in the pyramid. The odds on ranking for highly targeted niche keywords increase and that has a phenomenal effect on quality converting traffic.

A pyramid structure should be designed to target the most competitive keywords on the higher levels with the lower levels giving relevance by means of well themed quality backlinks.

The High-rise pyramid also provides a natural occurrence of natural backlinks. This is due to the fact that it is easier for webmasters to target niche themes as a whole as the site structure is very friendly in this regard.

Ensuring that a site with a High-rise pyramid structure can be properly indexed is of great importance. It is general knowledge in SEO circles that lengthy query strings can cause indexing issues. Due to the fact that large sites are often done in PHP, ASP or .net makes it extremely important to ensure that proper indexing is possible and this must be kept in mind the entire time.