Bee Documents Website Re-organization

Monday, July 18, 2005

I now have over 170 pages of content that I have written for the Bee Documents' website! For the past week I have been working on reorganizing the way the pages are stored on the server.

Previously, all the HTML files were in one folder with the graphics in another folder. The advantage of this approach is that all the URLs are simple. For example: http://www.BeeDocuments.com/timeline.html

However, with such a large amount of pages, it is hard to tell which graphic goes with which page and it is easy to get lost in the growing directory. Now, I am changing the organization to a hierarchical structure will make it easier for me to maintain.

The second, and more important advantage is that I hope to increase my rankings in Google search results. for over a year, I have been closely monitoring my web traffic and search rankings on certain keywords like "timeline software." I am getting pretty good at achieving page one results for the words that are most important to me and most of my new business comes for people finding me on the search engines. Having keywords in the URL can be a factor in the ranking and I want every possible advantage. For example, my new timeline URL will be (notice the word 'software' in the URL): http://www.BeeDocuments.com/software/timeline.html

It is not an easy matter to rearange the entire site as it breaks all the internal links on all the pages. However, I am about 80% of the way done and will test the new site on my test server before making it live next week. I will also need to create redirect pages for all the old URLs since I don't want to break the links for external blogs and articles who are linking to my pages. It is a painful process but I figure that it is better to do it now rather than wait until I have 500 pages on my site!