SEO friendly file and folder structures

When i started as the in-house Head of SEO in my organization one of my first tasks was to plan and design our next Brand website from the ground up so that it’s SEO compliant, or SEO optimised and rank well.

From a Dev perspective it had to have all the bells and whistles and from a Design point of view it needed to be very eye catching and user-friendly. So working with these two departments is a challenge for any SEO as these guys historically do not really care much for SEO and herein lays the challenge that i enjoy every day.

Once the website is live as a combined effort, it ranks well, brings in revenue and you get good ROI, everyone starts to understand why SEO needs to be implemented RIGHT from the start in the planning phase already.

I had a few different views on how i would go about designing the file and folder layout but i needed to do this in conjunction with all the other stakeholders in the company which sometimes can make your life as in-house SEO very, very interesting.

In order to minimize the collateral damage to the Dev Department and award winning Creative Department’s ego’s i had to come up with something simple, easy, pretty and yes –> Search Engine friendly. Now, i have seen many different ways of building a file and folder structure but I wanted one that would be best suited to our unique brand and products.

This was it:
www.ourdomain.com/top-keyword/
www.ourdomain.com/top-keyword/secondary-keyword/

Yes, i did not include .html, .asp, .aspx or .php for a reason. The URL above is clean, sexy and very powerful from a search phrase perspective. I could also have done it a few other ways like:

www.ourdomain.com/top-keyword.html
www.ourdomain.com/top-keyword/secondary-keyword.html
or
www.ourdomain.com/best-keyword.html
www.ourdomain.com/2nd-best-keyword.html
www.ourdomain.com/3rd-best-keyword.html

I realised that if i use a file structure like as per my 1st example i could have my secondary-keyword tie in with my top-keyword as in
www.ourdomain.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-tips/ (effectively killing two birds with one stone)

Some people could argue that this could be overkill from a keyword spam perspective but it’s not. Google loves it and we rank 5th on page one out of 31 million results. Reason being that, had i done the structure like this: www.ourdomain.com/blue-widgets/tips/ I would’ve missed the opportunity to slot in another key-phrase like blue-widget-tips which is a different key-term to blue-widgets all together and you could effectively rank for both whilst ranking for just the “tips” key-term would be a waste of energy.

Why did i not use this method? www.ourdomain.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-tips.html (including a file extension)

Because I do not feel it’s necessary for everyone to see the platform my site is on at first glance (although a view source can tell you quick enough) and I also don’t want Google to index a less than sexy URL. Let’s face it: www.ourdomain.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-tips.html or www.ourdomain.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-tips/index.html isn’t as neat or clean as as www.ourdomain.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-tips/

In actual fact, the real URL looks like this: www.ourdomain.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-tips/index.aspx but using the .htaccess file I am effectively “hiding” the file extension because it doesn’t NEED to be there. (in a good way)

Well, Google loves it. There is no right or wrong here, and there are many ways to skin a cat but this file structure was pretty, easy to remember, easy to index, looks pretty in the SERPS and it works.

So there you go! My first post!