How best to structure your website hierarchy

So you are making a website and you want to know how to break down the hierarchy of your pages. How they relate to the homepage? How they are stored on your server (root folder vs. sub-folders within the root)? How does this effect anything? Should you care?

Lets answer the last question first. If the answer is no then stop here and move to the next post. If it is yes then lets go further.

This is all based on designing a standard website (this doesnt apply so much to the larger behemoth sites that have a staff to manage but for probably 99% of sites out there).

first lets look at your navigation.

So here you see an example site hierarchy built. Each level of pages falls into a tier. So the homepage is Tier 1, the pages below that are Tier 2 and so on. The higher the tier the more important the page (not just for your site but also for search engines).

Search engines will come in to your site’s homepage and from there they will keep going deeper. Starting with Tier 2, then Tier 3 and so forth. So when creating a site put the more important pages higher.

The thing however is that a user can enter your site through any tier depending on the search term so make sure the site is laid out easily for them to be able to get up a tier and to the homepage with a minimal amount of digging. The rule of thumb is that any and all pages should be no more than 2 tiers away from your home page. This means you are looking at a 3 tier system. Its not written in stone its just a general rule to follow.

Next, does it matter if you save your pages to the root folder or subfolders within the root? Well pages in the root folder are looked at with more love than those that get deeper into your server folder tree. So here is just preference and how you want to organize your site, but in the end it does matter for SEO. Not a HUGE deal but every little advantage counts.

So in conclusion, keep your pages in the root directory of your webserver and try to limit your site hierarch to a 3 tier system. Follow these little steps and you are on your way to making sites that are friendly to the spiders and more importantly your visitors.