Keep your directories to a minimum and optimize your organization. Ever so often one of our SwinginSarah clients will come to us and ask us to help them figure out how they can have their site architecture be more than three directories deep. In every case we looked at what they were trying to do and found that they were trying to do something that they really shouldn’t. Proper organization will always trump extra categories.
There a number of truths at play here:
1. No product or page on your web site should be more than 3 or 4 clicks away from any other place.
2. No pages on your site should be nested more than 3 directories from the root directory. For example, take a look at the url of this particular page. It probably looks something like this:
http://www.dotcomjungle.com/DCJ_University/Search_Engine_Optimization/Navigation/1129.html
Each of the directories (folders on your web server) is separated by a /. So this web page, 1129.html, resides in the Navigation folder, which is inside the Search_Engine_Optimization folder, which is inside the DCJ_University, which is in the root directory of the web site. The page is three directories deep and therefore 3 clicks from the home page.
3. Search Engines don’t like to crawl too deep into your site. If you keep everything close and easy to click to, then your search engine results will perform better.
4. Same goes for your customers, if you make them work to get somewhere, they will go somewhere else.
