Website Architecture - What is the Best Structure For Your Website?

The architecture of your website affects the behavior of your visitors and your rankings in the search engines. If your visitor can't find the content within 3 clicks of your home page they will leave and visit your competitors' sites. This means you'll lose visitors and traffic. If the search engines can't find content buried deep in your website by following the links on the home page you'll miss out on attaining good search engine rankings.

Architectural hierarchy

The further your content is from the root folder of your website the more difficult it is for search engines or visitors to find it. If it's an HTML website create a 3 tiered structure. The 1st tier is your homepage. The 2nd tier are the subcategories. The 3rd tier are the subcategories of your subcategories. For example if your website topic is about website design (Ist tier) your 2nd tier could contain the categories of design, building, marketing and maintenance. The marketing category could be expanded into a 3rd tier that contains SEO marketing, article marketing, pay per click advertising and link building.

If you have a very large website your content may be more than 3 clicks away from the home page. In that case create a site map containing all the links to your web pages. The site map should be linked from the homepage so when the search engines come to visit your site they will index the links within your site map page.

Create subdirectories

Instead of placing all your files within the root of your website create subdirectories to organize the different sections. For example if your site has a section for articles create a subdirectory named articles. Place all CSS files in the CSS subdirectory, JavaScript files in a JavaScript subdirectory and images in an image sub folder. If you need to update your website it will be easy to find, add, or edit the files.

Use server side includes for easy website maintenance

Your website will become hard to manage if it expands to hundreds of web pages. For example, if you wish to change the dates for each page you will have to edit each page separately then upload them all to the server. Server-side includes (SSI) makes this easy to achieve. Editing one file immediately updates all the pages simultaneously. For example, if you wish to change the footer on all 100 pages simply include the footer code in the SSI file then upload that file to the server.

Content management system (CMS)

This is where you use software like Joomla or WordPress to separate content from design. This enables you to easily add content from an administration panel without having to upload files to the server. It makes websites easy to maintain without having to learn HTML. Research the advantages and disadvantages of using a content management system before building a website.

Define the purpose and structure of your website before you begin to build it. This will help determine the success of your online business by improving visitor retention and search engine rankings.

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com.

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