Best website IA/structure for SEO?
-
What's the current thinking on the best structure of information on a website for SEO? Structure for visitors can be best achieved through navigation menus, but I am more interested in how I should organise my URL structure so Google can make sense of the depth of my site topics.
The website is an Asian travel blog so there are essentially two specific types of post on the site. One type is location specific (may be about an attraction, a city, a region or a country). The other type is general (usually about an aspect of travel like travel cash, visas, scams, etc).
At the moment, all my general posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[post-name]. My location-specific posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/[country]/[region-or-city]/[place-name]/ so that Google can see I have depth of topics about each country and region. But I find it hard to keep consistency in this arrangement of URLs and I don't know if I might be better off to just have everything flat and tagged as a blog post like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[country]-[region-city]-[post-name]/?
What's best practice these days? How are others organising travel blog websites?
-
You can accomplish this IA with folders or with the slug, the key is how you interlink everything. That is how you can show your related articles and what the most important article is on a given topic. The Bruce Clay article (IMHO) is still relevant, I think you do not need to get as granular due to things like Hummingbird. I tend to think of organizing around a topic with a set of key words, vs getting super granular with the keyword siloing. I think for the user it still makes sense that way as you need to make up an organizational structure that is simple and easy to understand vs having so many subcategories that they get confused.
Cheers!
-
Hi John, yes I was aware of that article from Bruce Clay and that's how I determined my original URL structure. I'm just not sure it's the most current advice any more.
-
We are getting alot of immediate uplift for clients by adopting a silo structure. These are sites with a high reliance on content.
I am not sure if there are detailed articles on moz yet but try http://www.bruceclay.com/search/?cx='015472998223451858647%3A_jdk1qeo31u&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=silo&sa=Search
Hope this assists.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website server errors
I launched a new website at www.cheaptubes.com and had recovered my search engine rankings as well after penguin & panda devestation. I'm was continuing to improve the site Sept 26th by adding caching of images and W3 cache but moz analytics is now saying I went from 288 medium issues to over 600 and i see the warning "45% of site pages served 302 redirects during the last crawl". I'm not sure how to fix this? I'm on WP using Yoast SEO so all the 301's I did are 301's not 302's. I do have SSL, could it be Http vs Https? I've asked this question before and two very nice people replied with suggestions which I tried to implement but couldn't, i got the WP white screen of death several times. They suggested the code below. Does anyone know how to implement this code or some other way to reduce the errors I'm getting? I've asked this at stackoverflow with no responses. "you have a lot of http & https issues so you should fix these with a bit of .htaccess code, as below. RewriteEngine On
On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L] You also have some non-www to www issues. You can fix these in .htaccess at the same time... RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] You should find this fixes a lot of your issues. Also check in your Wordpress general settings that the site is set to www.cheaptubes.com for both instances." When I tried to do as they suggested it gave me an internal server error. Please see the code below from .htaccess and the server error. I took it out for now. BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^.$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@cheaptubes.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.0 -
Best category page structure on MY ecommerce site? Advice please
Hi all, I run the site: http://goo.gl/YATL2i I have had this category set up like this for a while now - but wonder if its confusing to google, and potentially my users... let me start by saying my products are available in 3 formats (soon to be 4), so for example i have 3 pages for cctv systems: Analogue / SD cctv systems: http://goo.gl/SPkdYW hd sdi systems: http://goo.gl/uksRAD ip systems: http://goo.gl/UMHBd0 each of the above sub categories then have a further sub category of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 or 16 camera kit page... I am trying to figure out if it would be better to just have one "cctv systems" page, and use filters in the left menu so users can filter by format, number of cameras etc etc... but these filters would not navigate to other pages but simply limit the view on the one "cctv systems" page. If you think 1 page with filters is best - can you then advise what should i do with all the sub category pages i no longer need? 301 rediret to the main cctv systems page? Basically i currently have my site set up so cctv products are categorised by the format i,e SD, HD-SDI or IP... Which i thought was very important the user doesnt mix formats as it can not work - but am thinking maybe i should catorgorize by type i.e CCTV Camera, CCTV Recorders or CCTV Systems, and then use filters to drill further down in the categories. Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated. thanks
On-Page Optimization | | isntworkdull0 -
What are the Best On-Site SEO Practices before an E-commerce Site Goes Live?
Hello, I’m working on a client’s E-commerce website. This website is not live yet. Before the site goes live, I am curious to know what the best practices of On-site SEO are. Please let me know from which factor should I start analyze? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | TopLeagueTechnologies0 -
URL for a new website
Hi, I am creating a new website for a client. Is it best to include the keywords from the most common search in the domain name, they would like: forenamesurname.com but should I be recommending: weddingmakeupbyforename.com Does it make much difference to search rankings if the keyword is in the domain name? Thanks v much
On-Page Optimization | | danieldunn100 -
URL Structure
What's the best way to set up a url structure? When a user goes through the funnel should it show it in the url? Like this: domain.com/thickness/high-density/1-mil-plastic-bags (1 mil plastic bags is a subcategory - when the user is at this page they will see many products. When they select one - it brings them to a product detail page which I think should be done like this: domain.com/product-name regardless of the funnel that brought them there. Does this make sense?) or **domain.com/1-mil-plastic-bags ** Also, is there a limit of how many "/" could be used?
On-Page Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
2 Question about URL structure
Hello guys 1 - I have a question about the best structure for URLs from the point of view of SEO: Is it OK to use the URL as mywebsite.com.br/long-tail-article Or is better this mywebsite.com.br/category/long-tail-article 2 - When part of my keyword is already in my "category", for example: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-is-good I leave it as it is, or in the following way: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing-is-good NOTE: Do not take into account that this URL would be different from other URLs in this category
On-Page Optimization | | seomasterbrasil0 -
Page Analysis on our asp.net site is showing the following for HTML Text - //
paintball-online.com This is consistent on every page, despite these pages having text. I assume the SEOMoz tool is working just fine and we have a coding issue that may be hindering our SEO efforts. Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Istoresinc0 -
4XX comments/feed/
I have an error in my SEOMoz crawl report is a 4XX client error on two of my websites, in both cases the error is coming from the link on my wordpress blog which is http://www.techelectricity.com/blog/comments/feed/ and http://blog.rangeroffroad.com/comments/feed/ (comments/feed/ is always the problem) Should I just ignore this error because it's supposed to open your RSS reader and not a link, or is this really an error I should address? thanks!!
On-Page Optimization | | texmeix0