Lately we have been talking to a lot of companies about how to get more bang for their buck from their website.  One of the easiest ways to do this (assuming your website is in a state that you actually WANT to drive traffic to it) is some simple SEO.  In doing a brief overview of many, many websites, there has been one thread that is so overwhelmingly pervasive, that I wanted to share it here.  That is the issue of URL structure.

If you want to make sure that people find what you have on your site, make the URL tell them what it is.  For example, if you have a recipe for Pecan Pie, don’t put it on your http://www.mycompany.com/daily_recipe location.  Put it on http://www.mycompany.com/recipe/pecan_pie.  Have an article on improving battery life?  Put in in a URL that has improve_battery_life as part of it and you will see far more hits.  It’s amazing how easy this is to do, and yet it is by far the most common mistake I have seen on sites.