Folders Within Folders - Seo Friendly? Options

[samnoble18]

A site I am currently optimising is built up with a series of folders, one folder for each brand essentially.

The main home page situated in the root is titled index.php

Within each folder, the brand also has an index page which is titled index.php

The site is ranking for most of the keywords I am targeting but 80% of them are pointing to the home page rather than the brand page that I am optimising the keyword for.

1 - Can anyone see what could be causing the problem?
2 - Can individual folders rather than pages be optimised?
3 - Why would some of the keywords point to the correct brand page but majority of the terms point to the home page?

Thanks for your help

Sam

[1dmf]

1. Google must see the keyword most relvant to the home page than other pages, are you sure the other pages are indexed? have you tried the site:yourdomain operator to see what pages are indexed?

2. No - Search Engines index pages , not websites or folders , a folder is merely part of the path to a URI

3. see no.1 , if your homepage far out weighs other pages in terms of PR and IBL's with keyword relevant anchor text, this can cause the phenomenon.

Classic example is to search for the term 'click here' , the no.1 position is a PDF from adobe and the words 'click here' appear no-where on the page, it's all the IBL's the page has with the anchor text 'click here' causing the phenomenon

[Jill]

2 - Can individual folders rather than pages be optimised?

The folder is the same thing as folder/index.php file so yes, it can certainly be optimized.

[1dmf]

that's a page, not a folder content, and it's only relative to the default page set via IIS / the webserver.

You can optimise the page index.php but if there are other pages in that folder, you will need to do them separately.

[samnoble18]

Thanks for all your comments.

So basically, the folder structure that they currently have is fine so long as
a - The pages within the folder are indexed with the search engines
b - I am optimising each page for a key term

In terms of getting the key terms to point to the relevant brand page, this is just a case of continuing to build IBL's to the page and check that there are no IBL's pointing to the home page with incorrect anchor text?

Thanks again

[1dmf]

yup , more or less.

Some IBL's if you have no control over them, don't worry, all IBL's are valuable whether carying the desired KWD relevancy or not.

[Michael Martinez]

If pages that were formerly ranking for keywords have been removed then Google sometimes just lists the homepage/root URL for the site.

If a lot of people link to the domain root rather than deep-link to the correct pages, Google may still just list the root URL.

If the site architecture is not well-designed, Google (and other search engines) may not have a real good idea of how the site is structured, and so they'll pick the root URL. For example, if internal navigation is sparse or masked search engines have a hard time putting all the pages together in the right topic groups.

[samnoble18]

Thanks for the comments Michael.

We havent changed the targeted phrases for each page, I have updated the Meta slightly though to include the terms and more specific information. Would this have caused a problem with indexing the page for the right keyword?

I dont think search engines are are having issues navigating the site as other child pages are ranking for chosen phrases. I would say approx 70% of the targeted keywords are going to the home page but the other 25% are going to the correct child page.

[1dmf]

I have updated the Meta slightly though to include the terms and more specific information. Would this have caused a problem with indexing the page for the right keyword?

which meta are you referring to?

If it's the keyword meta tag then no SE's generally ignore them

If it's the description meta tag then yes , it is believed having keywords within the description meta tag can help with SEO.