Site structure question

[JayAdams32]

I'm currently working on a very awkward custom-WP setup, in which I can't maintain the present drop-down navigation menu without having those pages under a parent or without completely recoding everything.

I have two requirements, for SEO purposes I'm looking for the following structure for each targeted landing page:

www.example.com/landing-page

as opposed to www.example.com/sub/landing-page

Of course, having my landing pages as a child, I get the latter of the two. For navigational purposes they need to fall under a specific category in a drop-down menu. With any other theme or setup this is an easy fix, but not here. What I have now is that the landing pages are currently placed under a parent category page. But, they have custom permalinks. The permalinks are setup as follows www.example.com/landing-page

But, technically the exact structure is still www.example.com/sub/landing-page which then redirects to the custom permalink.

So, my question is - in an attempt to get my most important landing pages close to the root for better PR and crawlability, do I still get the same benefit with my current setup? Is this structure I have, better, worse, or indifferent?

Thanks.

[evolvingSEO]

Jay

It does get a little insignificant if its a small site (let's say under 50 pages excluding the blog).

Subfolders are a great way to categorize your content and structure the site so that users and engines can understand the relationships. This is particularly useful on a larger site, where this type of categorization is more important.

I'd say, small site - not a big deal. Make them short and avoid repetitive keywords.

BUT if you anticipate this growing into a larger site, you're going to want that flexibility. Thinking long term it is a little limiting to have a theme that doesn't allow for this option.

-Dan

[JayAdams32]

Hi Klarke, yep that's the first thing I tried. Unfortunately with the way this particular site is setup that technique doesn't work. This theme uses custom widgets as the nav menu, and using a regular WP nav won't work without some serious recoding.

[Klarke]

You can setup all Landing Pages as "pages".

Then use WordPress Menus to set which ones are drop down by dragging and dropping them into indented positions.