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I am a new member, and I appreciate the opportunity to join the SEP forum.
I have a Web site, and am anxious to increase its PageRank, and traffic to the site.
I have been studying the steps described in Brett Tabke's article "26 Steps to 15K a Day". In one of the steps, he recommends including a keyword in a title, description tag, a URL, etc.
My question concerns including the keyword in a URL. Let's say my domain name is www.abcstores.com, and I sell two types of shoes - work shoes and dress shoes. Should I try to use directory names and/or file names that include the keyword terms?
I'm thinking that one of the two variation below may be what Mr. Tabke is recommending:
VARIATION #1
www.abcstores.com/dress-shoes/index.html
www.abcstores.com/dress-shoes/prices.html
www.abcstores.com/work-shoes/index.html
www.abcstores.com/work-shoes/prices.html
VARIATION #2
www.abcstores.com/shoes/dress/index.html
www.abcstores.com/shoes/dress/prices.html
www.abcstores.com/shoes/work/index.html
www.abcstores.com/shoes/work/prices.html
I would be very grateful if someone could help me understand exactly what he is recommending, and the best way to accomplish it.
Thanks very much!
www.abcstores.com/shoes/dress/
www.abcstores.com/shoes/dress/prices/
www.abcstores.com/shoes/work/
www.abcstores.com/shoes/work/prices/
;-)
I like the fact that the directory names avoid hyphens, although I'm not sure if hyphens between keywords should be avoided or not.
In your directory structure (www.abcstores.com/shoes/)
it appears that the directory "shoes" would contain directories but no html files. Would that have a negative impact on PageRank?
Also, in your structure some of the content pages would be three directory levels below the root - e.g., www.abcstores.com/shoes/work/prices/. I recall that in Brett Tabke's "26 Steps" article, he recommends keeping all pages within 2 directory levels of the root, helping the site to be crawlable by spiders. (That was item #I - "Put it Online".)
Pardon these additional questions, but being a beginner I've got a lot to learn!
The disadvantage is that creating the site is difficult with all those files in one directory. GoLive has the ability to flatten all the directories when uploading and I believe Dreamweaver does too. Flattening the site means all files will be placed in the root directory, but will remain in the directories on you computer.
[webmasterworld.com...]
It makes sense to NOT use directories on your web site since spiders tend to crawl the root directory before getting to directories (in most cases).
MYTH
Spiders don't have give two hoots about the idea of "home page". They just follow links.
In particular, you can make /a/b/c/d/e/f/home.html the page that has the most inbound links, and Google will happily crawl that page WAY more than your root directory.
Note that I said "crawl that page" and not "crawl that directory". Because people typically use a hierarchical structure that gives every page in the same sub-directory about the same amount of inbound links, they see Googlebot crawls all those pages with about the same frequency and then use magical thinking to believe that Googlebot "crawls directories". Googlebot knows links, not directories. It's easy to construct a sub-directory where "foo.html" gets crawled twice as often as any other resource in the same directory.
This has been tested exhaustively.
Whenever we retest, we rediscover that:
a) there's no SEO reason to avoid using directories.
b) there's no SEO reason to avoid using hyphens to separate words in directory names.
FWIW, there is some quantitive evidence that the further down a directory is, the less well it ranks. However, I don't think that it has to do with depth of directory. I think it is a natural result of the fact that generally the deeper a page, the less inbound links it has, and therefore the less importance it will have. But there are exceptions and the exceptions occur whenever a deeper page is well linked to from inside and outside the site.
If a page is four directories down but is so important that it has a link directly from the homepage and many internal pages, and also has a bunch of external pages pointing to it, it will do just fine...i.e., it has more to do with direct linking than anything else.
As for your particular site, here's another alternative. I personally would be guided by the logic of the site and what makes more sense to you...
www.abcstores.com/dress-shoes/
www.abcstores.com/dress-shoes/prices/
www.abcstores.com/work-shoes/
www.abcstores.com/work-shoes/prices/
I would not worry about using one hyphen in a directory name. Might think about using two. Would not use three.
www.example.com/shoes/dress/
www.example.com/shoes/dress/prices/
www.example.com/shoes/work/
www.example.com/shoes/work/prices/
I'm a lot more efficient on the keyboard if I don't have to worry about using that hyphen key. :)
This has been tested exhaustively.
By whom? And what were the test criteria? Did you use an index page in the sub-directory with supporting pages in same or below? Did you use any form of metadata such as the link rel element to group those pages together?
I'm going to put myself on the chopping block and say that root level pages have more weight than named pages if the proper elements are utilized to group those pages together.
And yes, I am well aware of the value of linking to a specific page within the site. You can easily take any page, no matter where it resides and make it trump all others. But, that is not what we want to do. We want to spread the love as they say. ;)
I'll be thinking about the different approaches that have been suggested, as well as reading the discussions in other topics that have been posred in the SEP forum.
Once it's all "sunk in" a bit better, I'll be ready to make some changes. :)
Thanks, again, for everyone's help!
