New Site Structure Means Turbulence Ahead

MWI’s rankings are probably going to go a little haywire for the next few days while Google sorts out where all our pages got moved to. Much of the site structure has been changed this week to reflect changes in our service offerings. Our ranking for “utah seo” dropped four spots today from #1 to #5 and our rankings for “salt lake city search engine marketing” dropped 15 spots. I can only assume it’s due to these changes in our site structure and we’ll see those rankings pop back up there within a few days.

The extent of the changes are of this nature. All of our service offerings were previously contained in a /work/ directory, so we had mwi.com/work/web_design, mwi.com/work/search_engine_optimization, etc. Now those have been changed to mwi.com/web-design and mwi.com/search-engine-optimization, respectively. We’ve also added a new section for search engine marketing.

We’ve also added a lot of case studies to show off some of the work we’ve been doing during the past year or so.

Avalon Hills Eating Disorder Treatment Center – Pay Per Click management, SEO, and web design.
Eagle Gate College – PPC setup and training, landing page design.
Workforce Solutions – SEO, SEM, web design.
Union Park Center – Website design, print brochure.
Utah’s Hogle Zoo – Web design.
GNi – Website design, content management system.
Mstar – Website design.
ShoulderPainPumpLitigation.com – Website design, SEO, PPC management.

I’ll have to post separately about each one of these, but not this week. It’s been enough work just getting the site restructured and all the content written for each of these new pages.

In the long run these changes should help with the SEO, or in some cases it will at least provide an interesting experiment. I’ve heard that directory structure matters and doesn’t matter. A flat file structure is best, and having lots of directories with keywords in the directory names is best. I’m not sure who to trust other than myself, and this will be one way to find out. Certainly having everything in a /work/ directory was almost completely pointless from an SEO standpoint, so the changes that have been made seem more logical and bring all the content up one directory level, so that if the proximity to the top-level directory matters, this will certainly help.

Probably most important is the addition of the new directories for search engine marketing and SEO consulting and training, which should help the MWI to start getting a big boost for those terms, seeing as how we focused no effort on those terms previously.