Flat Site Structure?

[chansen]

This post is deleted!

[loevgaard]

Regardless of "folders" in URLs Google will identify the structure by how the links flows through your site so it's merely a matter of optimization of URLs and keywords in the URLs.

By that I am not saying that a folder structure wont give any clues on the layers of content, but still I would argue that Google will figure it out by other means than folder structure. Breadcrumbs is another hint of content structure.

[DougRoberts]

There are lots of thing to take into consideration here.

Usually, the choice of CMS and the scale of content will put major constraints on the approach you take. (If you're only got a handful of pages then who cares!)

From ans SEO perspective, using folders/sections can help you get relevant keywords into the URL (Make sure they make sense and natural/unforced).

If your content is likely to be shared (via whatever medium) then having sensible (but concise) URLS will help both in making sure any backlinks you get using the URL as anchor text will contain relevant keywords, but also help provide confidence to the person looking at the link and may help with click-throughs.(Don't look spammy!)

Think about how your URLs will appear in different media (in an email, on a business card or product flyer, on the side of a truck?)

Sensible folder/section/page names can also help when it comes to maintenance down the road too. If you're got everything relating to one particular product in one folder/section it can be a lot easier to set up redirects to replacement products later.

The downside, is that for a small site using too many sections/folders just makes urls longer than they need to be and can make things more complicated than they need to be. (I've seen projects where pointless/duplicate content has been created just to make the structure work...)

How you actually store you content (in folders/sections or flat) is less of a concern than making sure you have a clear and logical navigation system.

As a simple human, can you quickly build a mental modal of the content from the navigation?

Good navigation can flatten even the most complicated folder/section structure and make sure that all your key content is easy to find by humans, and crawlable by search engines (xml sitemaps can help crawlers and don't forget sitemaps for humans too, they're often forgotten about or produced as an unloved after-thought.

Remember that search engines don't have access to your web hosting and don't do systematic indexes of your folders, they'll index your site by using the internal links to get from one page to another.

Here's a good article: Internal Linking Strategies for 2012 and Beyond

The best approach is to consider your site/business goals and the goals/aims of your visitors.

As well as a top down view, remember to start with the goal/conversion pages and work backwards through your products/offers to make sure there's a clear fluid conversion funnel.

Even a small site can benefit from usability testing (it doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds and recommend Steve Krug's book "Don't make me think.")

Hope this helps!

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[chansen]

Thanks for the reply! This confirms a lot of what we thought.