You will also find our Domain Name Choice page helpful in understanding how to name your new domains, directories and files especially the Why Hyphenated Domain Names section.
Before we discuss how to link your pages together you need to decide where to physically locate your websites pages. There are many ways to organize a site including putting every file in the root of the domain to breaking up sections of a site into various directories (the latter is usually advisable).
There is a common misconception that pages in the root of a domain (www.website.com/web-page.html would be a web page in the root of the domain) will be ranked higher than pages deep within the directory structure www.website.com/web/web-page.html will be one level deep). In fact it used to be believed by some if you went too deep with your directory structure (over 4 directories deep - www.website.com/web-1/web-2/web-3/web-4/web-page.html) those web pages would not even be spidered at all (not true BTW)!
The reason for this misconception is to do with common linking structures, not directory structure. The directory structure tends to mimic the link or navigation structure of the site and if it takes at least 4 links to go from your home page to the deepest pages of your website some might be missed by the search engine spiders. What’s more those deep linked pages will tend to have 1 or a very small number of unimportant links to them and so as links are very important they won’t be seen as important by the search engines. Put another way if you only send one unimportant link to a page on your site why would the search engines believe it’s an important page and rank it highly!
So the reality is you can put your pages as deep as you like as long as they are linked correctly (try to go for no more than 2 clicks from the home page, 3 at the very most and if in doubt site map).
Thanx for visiting
Rohit Mehra
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