Build a Site Structure for SEO
Getting your website's structure right is one of the most important technical SEO basics, yet it's often overlooked. A website shouldn't be a random collection of pages and posts. It should be an organized collection of content that's easy for search engines and users to navigate and understand.
1. What Is Site Structure?
Your website's structure is the way that content (pages and posts) is grouped. This is sometimes referred to as your website's architecture and is all about how your content is linked together and presented to users and search engines. It's your website's framework. A good website structure makes it easy for users to navigate between pages and search engines to crawl your content and understand what your site is about. Think about it as how pages on your website relate to one another, specifically how they branch off your homepage and are grouped within deeper directories.
And planning a site structure includes considering your:
- URL structures
- Navigation menus
- Categorization
- Breadcrumbs<
- Internal linking
2. The Importance of Your Site's Structure
Whether you have a small website or a large website, site structure is an important component for success as your site structure impacts both users, in terms of its accessibility and user-friendliness, and for search engines, in terms of crawlability and technical aspects. So let's take a look at the reasons why you need to take the time to properly define this for these key reasons.
Site Structure for Users
Your website's primary purpose is to put your products or services in front of your target audience, such as your next customer or client. That means that your users should be at the heart of everything you do. And when we look at the reason why your site's structure is so important for your users, we can break it down into three key things:
- Site Structure Is Important for UX
The structure you choose has a direct impact on your website's usability, and this means making it easier for users to find the products, services, or information that they're looking for. The easier it is for someone to find what they landed on your site for, the higher the chance that they'll become a client or customer.
- A Good Site Structure Makes It Easier to Navigate
When you carefully plan out your site's structure to help users find what they want as easily as possible, you're making it easier to navigate. Since one of the key functions of content on a website is to help push prospects through your sales funnel, it makes sense that you'd want to make it as simple as possible for a user to flow through the sales funnel by improving your navigation.
- A Good Site Structure Groups Content and Makes Pages Easy to Reach in As Few Clicks As Possible
No one wants to spend an age looking for the content that they're after. A good site structure makes it easier to find pages and posts in as few clicks as possible, keeping users engaged and stopping them from bouncing.
3. What Does a Good Site Structure Look Like?
We've already defined that a good site structure should:
- Group topically related content together
- Highlight your most important pages
- Keep content simple and organized in a logical hierarchy
This site architecture is based around what is known as topic clusters, and we'll give a quick breakdown of the strategy. They're an effective approach to structuring your site, helping you group topically related content together and putting in place a solid internal linking structure. Here's an example topic cluster with a pillar page. Using topic clusters helps you showcase topical authority, which is vital for earning top rankings on the SERPs.
4. How to Define a Site Structure That Works
Ready to plan out a site structure that works great both for your users and search engines? Here's a step-by-step guide to defining your website structure:
- Plan Your Site Structure and Hierarchy
- Consider Your Site's URLs
- Carefully Plan Your Site's Navigation Menus
- Use Internal Linking Strategically<
- Create an HTML Sitemap
Plan Your Site Structure and Hierarchy
Your pillars are the top-level content pages that cover the broader topic. When planning your pillar pages, you should consider how you can cover a wider topic at a broad level within the page. This leaves an opportunity to expand upon the specifics within the relevant cluster.
Think about these as more in-depth pages that answer specific questions about the broader topic. These pages should then link back to the main pillar page—this helps create a solid understanding of how your content is connected. It helps to visually map out your site's structure at this stage to help you to see how topic clusters fit together and where specific pages and posts should go.
Consider Your Site's URLs
Let's say your pillar page is http://creativesaints.com/. That would mean all of your cluster content sits on URLs like http://creativesaints.com/website-development.html. This is known as URL silos and helps to keep topical relevance within a site's subdirectory, and wherever possible, it makes sense to structure your site in this way.
However, this isn't the only method. If you're unable to group all of your cluster content within the pillar page's subdirectory, that doesn't mean you can't use this method of site structuring. Siloing URLs helps to keep topical relevance within folders; however, if this cannot be achieved due to technical restrictions, you can use internal linking to showcase the topical connection between pages.
Carefully Plan Your Site's Navigation Menus
While navigation menus primarily exist to help your users find the pages they're looking for; they're a great indication of the most important pages. And you need to think carefully about the way you structure your navigation menus.
Use Internal Linking Strategically
One of the key benefits of internal linking is that they help search engines to understand your site's structure (and the topical connection between pages), pass link authority, and help users to navigate between pages, You can internally link using several different strategies, including:
- Breadcrumbs
- Contextual internal links
- Navigation links
Create an HTML Sitemap
These are sitemaps visible to users while also serving a list of URL links that can be crawled by search engines, further reducing the risk of orphan pages and allowing new pages to be discovered quickly. Don't forget that HTML sitemaps also distribute PageRank (link authority) and are recommended to be in place.
Don't underestimate the importance of getting your site's structure right and the impact it can have on your SEO performance. Take the time to plan a structure that works for both users and search engines and group your pages by topics, effectively distribute link authority and help get people to the pages they want to browse as quickly as possible.
Courtesy & Copyright
https://creativesaints.com/
http://graphicwebdesign.in/
https://www.papeel.com.br/
https://moz.com/blog/best-free-seo-tools
https://moz.com/blog?page=15
https://www.semrush.com/blog/website-structure/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/
https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-blogs/