What is the best way to handle small business site architecture?

[JohnWeb12]

I do allot of work for small businesses with around 15-20 total pages.  What is the best site architecture?  For example if its a landscaping website, should there be a services category page and pages under that (domain.com/services/lawn-mowing.html) or should it be flatter (domain.com/lawn-mowing.html)  They offer about 10 different services.

[Matt-Williamson]

I would personally go for the domain.com/lawn-mowing.html structure, less clicks to get to your information and easier from a crawl perspective, the extra category page seems like you would be having a page for a pages sake and you would just be burying your important content deeper in the site. Having a menu that has these ten services at the top level is much more efficient site architecture in my opinion. Obviously if it starts getting to much you would have to think about categories.

Remember you always want the minimal amount of links between the homepage and any other page on the site. For a small site you can have one level on your menu and provide relevant anchor text in the navigation on each page to the corresponding page. Obviously for any bigger site you would want to implement a pyramid structure to order the information efficiently.

[SEODinosaur]

If they offer 10 services I would use this URL: domain.com/lawn-mowing.html however you may want to link to it from a services page (domain.com/services.html ---> domain.com/lawn-mowing.html) here is a good WBF on internal linking : http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday