SEO: Navigation Part 2
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible for everyone. If your site aids them in that goal, they will reward you. But if your site is disorganized and the files are stored in a confusing fashion, then you may even find that your site is found lower in their results.
Think of it this way, if you have a filing cabinet and each of the folders in the cabinet are nicely labeled and are all in alphabetical order, even someone who’s never opened the cabinet before can easily find what they need. On the other hand, if you turned the filing cabinet upside down, dumped it out and stuffed it back in, it could take months to locate the right file. Websites are the same way. If your site isn’t layed out in a way that makes it easy for not only visitors to find information, but also for Google to categorize it, both visitors and Google are likly to leave.
So, before you ever begin thinking about creating the first page on your site, you need to draw a site map on paper. Sketch it out. Use a flow chart or just a bulleted outline. It doesn’t matter as long as you’re pre-planning the organization of your files. But be careful…
Google doesn’t like digging too deep into your virtual filing cabinet. It’s called deep crawling. Think of their computers that read through your site as being lazy. If they have to open a folder within another folder within another folder, they’ll just leave. Forget about having those deeply-buried pages ever be found. So, to encourage Google to read all of the pages on your site, another technique that savvy web masters are using is a logical method of file naming. They are avoiding the over use of folders and are just naming files something like article_new_seo_technique.html. That way all of the articles will be found grouped together in the list alphabetically but they are not buried within a folder called “articles.”
Chadd Bryant
