Little SEO advice needed.

How to best arrange directories for this......

[Nick_W]

Hi

I have a client with 2 major sections to his business:

• Fire fighting equipment
  
• Environmental waste clean up
  

Each of those sections has severall ranges of products.

I need to optimize for both the section and the product name

I had thought to do this:

www.site.com/fire-fighting/
www.site.com/fire-fighting/productA
www.site.com/fire-fighting/productB

but then thought it might be wiser to do this:

www.site.com/fire-fighting/
www.site.com/ProductA/

and link appropriately.

I know many of you are much more experienced than I and hoped for a little constructive comment. I have doubts on both. The first appears better organized/themed but the second seems better for keywords?

What do you think?

Many thanks

Nick

[NFFC]

How many products in each section?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Hi Nick,

Though I'm probably less experienced than you, I'd say it depends on the size of the site.

If the site is <10 pages I'd go for your second suggestion. If it is larger, I'm sure this theme you envision in the first example would be a better choice :)

Though I'm sure someone has direct experience and answers for it.

[Nick_W]

Thanks for the quick replies guys ;)

Well, the fire-fighting section has two main product ranges with several products in each range.

The environmental has similar. I'm thinking number 2 for this and really working hard at optimizing one page (site.com/fire-fighting/) for that key phrase.

What do you reckon?

Nick

[WebGuerrilla]

Split the difference.

Put what would be your index pages for your category directories in your root directory.

www.site.com/fire-fighting/index.html

becomes

www.site.com/fire-fighting.html

Then place your individual product pages in the corresponding directories.

www.site.com/fire-fighting/nomex-suits.html

I've always found that doing this increases your chances of ranking well for your top-level phrases.

The only thing you need to remember to do is to place a blank index page in your directories in order to prevent people from browsing your directory.

[Nick_W]

That sounds reasonable. What if the product pages need to be in their own directories? Would this be of the same benefit....

www.site.com/fire-fighting.html

linking to....

www.site.com/ProductA/(several pages here)

Or would I benefet more form having fire-fighting.html link to...

www.site.com/fire-fighting/ProductA/(pages)

Many thanks!

Nick

[mattur]

Is "fire fighting" the phrase you really want to optimize for?

Forgive me if you've already considered this, but IMHO terms like "fire extinguishers", "fire blankets" etc could be more effective.

Your visitors could then browse by product type:

www.site.com/fire-extinguishers/
www.site.com/fire-blankets/
...

and browse by supplier/range (targeting supplier-specific product searches):

www.site.com/supplierA/
www.site.com/supplierA/product-name.html
www.site.com/supplierB/
...

[JayC]

Since fire fighting equipment and environmental waste cleanup are only tangentially related, you might want to give some thought to using subdomains if it's possible with the site's host. For theming purposes, it might be beneficial to treat it as two separate sites.

[Digimon]

WEb Guerilla I don't understand the reason "to place a blank index page in your directories in order to prevent people from browsing your directory". Which would happen if you wouldn't have this blank index page?

[Nick_W]

If people doctor the url to see what's in the directory they'll get the apache generated index.

I actually took WebG's advice and did exactly that only the the 'index page' of the directory re-directs to the keyword.php page.

Nick

[Digimon]

So, the idea is put a blank index page with a redirect to the keyword.php to avoid people seeing an index page generated by Apache servers??
But, really, are there many people doing that? I mean typing directly that url "http://www.example.com/product/ index.html

[Nick_W]

Probably not. But as the solution is either 3lines of php or a blank html page it makes sense.

BTW, I'm not certain but I think Google backtracks without needing a link to the directorry.

I've caught google indexing a dir with no links to it whatsoever....

Nick

[WebGuerrilla]

>>But, really, are there many people doing that?

You would be suprised. I can't tell you how much valuable competitive info I've collected over the years just by testing directories for missing index pages.