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
-
Homepage organization schema question: logo lives on amazon server, can I call that out on the structured data?
Basically, the homepage organization schema has called out the logo, but it lives on the amazon server. We're having issues with Google rendering the correct logo on the knowledge graph. The URL for the amazon asset looks something like this: <brandname>-assets.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/<logo>.png</logo></brandname> Calling that out on the organization structured data for the logo is okay right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny1230 -
Does it hurt your SEO to have an inaccessible directory in your site structure?
Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder. Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible). Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm. Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc0 -
Question about moving content from one site to another without a 301
I could use a second opinion about moving content from some inactive sites to my main site. Once upon a time, we had a handful of geotargeted websites set up targeting various cities that we serve. This was in addition to our main site, which was mostly targeted to our primary office and ranked great for those keywords. Our main site has plenty of authority, has been around for ages, etc. We built out these geo-targeted sites with some good landing pages and kept them active with regularly scheduled blog posts which were unique and either interesting or helpful. Although we had a little success with these, we eventually saw the light and realized that our main site was strong enough to rank for these cities as well, which made life a whole lot easier, not to mention a lot less spammy. We've got some good content on these other sites that I'd like to use on our main site, especially the blog posts. Now that I've got it through my head that there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I understand that I could just start moving this content over so long as I put a 301 redirect in place where the content used to be on these old sites. Which leads me to my question. Our SEO was careful not to have these other websites pointing to our main site to avoid looking like we were trying to do something shady from a link building perspective. His concern is that these redirects would undermine that effort and having a bunch of redirects from a half dozen sites could end up hurting us somehow. Do you think that is the case? What he is suggesting we do is remove all of the content that we'd like to use and use Webmaster Tools to request that this content be removed from the index. Then, after the sites have been recrawled, we'll check for ourselves to confirm they've been removed and proceed with using the content however we'd like. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeAbrahamson0 -
Redirection question
How would I redirect this URL: http://www.members.mysite.com/ to this URL: http://www.mysite.com/ ? I cant figure it out
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Best Practice for ALT tags of flags to interlink multinational site
For a partial keyword match domain name what would you recommend as ALT tag to internlink country domains (different CCTLD)? Option 1)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
DOMAIN.com DOMAIN.de DOMAIN.co.uk => I am a bit concerned about this option in terms of potential penalty for keywords in ALT (since partial match domains) Option 2)
UK
DE
FR ... Option 3)
English UK
Deutsch Deutschland
Deutsch Österreich
Francais France => concerned here about mixing lots of languages in ALT tags in each page, which may confuse google language detection.0 -
How do I get the best from our Blog and build quality links and drive traffic to our site?
We have recently setup a Wordpress focused blog (blog.towelsrus.co.uk) which is very much work in progress. Because of financial constraints we had to host this on a separate sub domain. I need to get to grips with blogs is new to me (only been doing SEO this for 3 months now) and have have read may posts on the forums here that this is one of the best ways to build links and engage the audience. How do I go about getting people to read my blog, and should I use this to pull in traffic on keywords we cannot through the main site or should i use this to re-enforce and build traction on those keywords we are trying to rank for on the main site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Launching a new site with old, new and updated content: What’s best practice?
Hi all, We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content. We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together. Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content? Cheers, Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
URL Structure for Directory Site
We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?0