Question about best approach to site structure
-
I am curious if anyone can share some advice. I am working on planning architecture for a tour company. The key piece of the content strategy will be providing details on each of the tour destinations, with associated profiles for each city within those destinations. Lots of content, which should be great for the SEO strategy.
With regards to the architecture, I have a ‘destinations’ section on the Website where users can access each of the key destinations served by the tour company. My question is – from a planning perspective I can organize my folder structure in a few different ways.
http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/touring-regions/cities/
or
http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/
http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionA/
http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionB/cities-profile/
I am curious if anyone has an opinion on what might perform best in terms of the site structure from an SEO perspective. My fear is taking all of this rich content and placing it so many tiers down in the architecture of the site. Any advice that could be offered would be appreciated. Thanks.
-
Chad,
Chris makes a good point re the leaders in ranking and what are they doing. I would also look for chinks in armor. But, first I would stop what you are doing and back up: Do you have a sales funnel? Do you have a serious KWA? Do you have a sitemap predicated on KWA and UI/UX (Factoring in user habits? Likely user habits if the company is new?). To me url structure comes to a degree as a result of these items.
Once you have those, typically on a site of any size (we have particular expertise in the tourist industries on our dev team) you will have certain issues that you will need to make decisions on based on the clients needs, ui/ux, best seo that really are business decisions and you will likely get right - if you take it in order IMO. But that said, the structure I follow is based on some basic SEO rules - four clicks max, four clicks max, keep it simple for the bot (they all can't be Roger), then: What are the important business KWs I must rank for (destination first or event first or mode first, etc.) I would follow that down the line. Personally, I have never searched on Tour company (ies) nor have I searched on "destinations" or "Sights" so I would not have that in my architecture unless the KWA showed I should. So, instead of destinations for example what are they looking for specifically and can I get that in a menu/ sub-directory etc. Then follow your brain.
Sorry that I cannot give you a do it like this: A/B/C but from the fact you are looking I think you will get this and make it happen. My opinion is that after domain what is the first thing they are looking for that is a category then what specifically within that and then other data for a decision. To me you tell the search engine that you are at my domain...this is the most important keyword here, this is next, and this is the final destination that is rock solid.
Hope this helps,
Robert
-
You may take a look at how the other guys are doing it--the ones that are ranking at the top of the search results. Also, be sure to allow options for other means of finding the content (on your site and via search) e.g. destinations with similar histories, architecture, food, gifts, days of the week, nearby things to do, kid friendly, distance from specific landmarks, etc. Doing those things are what's going to set you apart from competitors in the search results.
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
-
Question about structuring @id schema tags
We are using JSON-LD to apply schema. My colleague had question about applying @id tags in the schema parent lists: While implementing schema, we've included @id as a parameter to both the "list" child of "ListItem" of a "BreadcrumbList" - on the same schema, we've added an @id parameter to mainContentOfPage and both @id parameters are set to the pages URL. Having this @id in both places is giving schema checker results that have the child elements of "mainContentOfPage" appearing under the "list" item. Questions: is this good or bad? Where should @id be used? What should @id be set to? Thanks for the insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Google Panda question Category Pages on e-commerce site
Dear Mates, Could you check this category page of our e-commerce site: http://tinyurl.com/zqjalng and give me your opinion about, this is a Panda safe page or not? Actually I have this as NOINDEX preventing any Panda hit, but I'm in doubt. My Question is "Can I index this page again in peace?" Thank you Clay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayRey0 -
Should I change my permalink structure?
Hi guys, hope you've had a manageable working week. Just after some advice! What would you think to changing the permalink structure of an already established entertainment website so that the category and postdate also appears in the URL, i.e "2014-01-01/news/this-is-the-post"? I have done it before without thinking about all the crawl errors it would cause and quickly reverted everything. However, I am now eager to get listed in Google News (don't worry, this isn't the only reason to change the URL) and think it might help things overall. Thoughts? Worth the effort or a pointless exercise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whittie0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Best way to transfer pagerank from one site to another
We currently own two sites (with unique domains) that accomplish a similar goal, but are completely different (so there's no duplicate content, etc) and were developed independently. Both sites have very good pagerank due to great press and inbound links over several years. Also both have thousands of pages and get a lot of inbound deep links. We plan on shutting one of the sites down so we can focus on the other. We'd like to transfer as much traffic and SEO/pagerank value from the one we're shutting down to the one we're continuing to focus on. What's the best way to do that? Should we just do a 301 redirect? Or keep the site running in some diminished form and link it to the site we're focusing on? I saw SEOmoz has a good guide on moving sites http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection which recommends a 301 redirect, but I wanted to see if the same applies when merging sites as we are in this case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 212areacode0 -
Best way to find broken links on a large site?
I've tried using Xenu, but this is a bit time consuming because it only tells you if the link sin't found & doesn't tell you which pages link to the 404'd page. Webmaster tools seems a bit dated & unreliable. Several of the links it lists as broken aren't. Does anyone have any other suggestions for compiling a list of broken links on a large site>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
What is the Ideal Structure for User Generated Product Reviews on My Site?
I apologize for the lengthy post, but I need help! Here is my current structure for product reviews: My product pages displays a set number of user product reviews before displaying a link to "see all reviews". So: http://www.domain.com/product/product-page Has product details, specs (usually generic from manufacturer) and 5 user product reviews. If there are more than 5, there is a link to see all reviews: http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=1 Where each page would display 10 user product reviews, and paginate until all user reviews are displayed. I am thinking about using the Rel Canonical tag on the paginated reviews pages to reference back to the main product page. So: http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=1 http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=2 http://www.domain.com/reviews/product-page?page=3 Would have the canonical URL of: http://www.domain.com/product/product-page Does this structure make sense? I'm unclear what strategy I should use, but currently the product review pages account for less than 2% of overall organic traffic. Thanks ahead of time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Corp0