21 Ways for Creating a Website Structure That’s Optimized for SEO
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Consequently, a good website structure increases the likelihood that a site visitor will become a client or customer. Creating an XML sitemap is one of the best ways to help search engines crawl your website. The trick here is to define your category and sub-category pages in a way that leaves no product page or piece of content unaccounted for. At the same time, you don’t want to create more categories than necessary. An orderly system of internal links creates pathways for link equity to pass from one page to another.
Hierarchical structure creates a tree-like shape when drawn out. On the right, you can see an example of a hierarchical website structure. This is a great example of how website structure makes it easy for users to find information. When a website’s homepage is linked to every important subpage, it makes easy for crawlers to crawl your site.
The 3 most common types of website structures
With the help of tools like Optimal Workshop, you can analyze visitor behavior and identify roadblocks in their customer journey. When you plan your pillar landing page, consider covering broad topics at the uppermost level of your site navigation. This provides the opportunity to expand on the specifics within each topic cluster. It’s easy to see how this site architecture can quickly scale as a website grows. Plus, it also leverages topically related content and establishes authority signals by organizing relevant information into clusters of interlinked pages. Those general pillar pages will attract top-of-the-funnel traffic.
If you’ve earned backlinks from reputable websites, you want to make the most of the authority and link equitythose endorsements lend. Aninternal linkingstructure passes that authority through a chain of related pages on your website. Without that structure in place, it’ll be more difficult to distribute the benefits https://globalcloudteam.com/ of your backlinking efforts. Your website structure plays an essential role in how visitors experience your content and search engines crawl your site. A good website structure facilitates user navigation and provides search engine crawlers with a clear understanding of the relationship between pages.
What is a Web Crawler? (In 50 Words or Less)
One internal linking caution you should exercise, though, is not stuffing keywords into your link’s anchor text. This is called black hat SEO, and to prevent it, Google has created specific algorithms to punish this kind of behavior. It is particularly important that crawlers can find all subpages quickly and easily when websites have a large number of subpages. For this reason, a website’s homepage needs to have links to the most important subpages. Files such as sitemap.xml and robots.txt also help the crawler do its job in this regard. This type of menu is usually paired with horizontal navigation bars.
You’ll have a hard time ranking with blog posts within a huge category. In this case, you should evaluate and optimize your categories; perhaps merge or split some of them. It is a crucial aspect of Site’s SEO performance but still the most underlooked phenomenon.
Importance of Website Structure
This structure is uncommon and is used mainly for websites with a small number of pages. The ideal website architecture is shaped like the branches of a tree or a pyramid. The general structure consists of a home page, categories, subcategories, posts, and pages.
More visitors will stick around, convert, and link back to your site by eliminating as much friction as possible. Since Google automatically generates sitelinks, there’s no direct way to optimize for them. Link equity (sometimes called “link juice”) refers to the how to plan a website structure authority passed from a linking page to a linked-to page. Use this ebook + sortable master list download to help determine whether a new set of SEO tools could be key to your agency’s success. Make sure that your navigation links are HTML… not JS or Flash.
Use Contextual Links
Weblike organizational structures pose few restrictions on the pattern of information use. In this structure the goal is often to mimic associative thought and the free flow of ideas, allowing users to follow their interests in a unique, heuristic, idiosyncratic pattern. This organizational pattern develops with dense links both to information elsewhere in the site and to information at other sites. Although the goal of this organization is to exploit the web’s power of linkage and association to the fullest, weblike structures can just as easily propagate confusion. Ironically, associative organizational schemes are often the most impractical structure for web sites because they are so hard for the user to understand and predict.
- Category pages make organizing your site’s architecture super easy over the long-term.
- Group the filtered phrases using the ‘Clustering’ tool in Serpstat.
- Even if you’re restructuring an existing website, doing keyword research upfront produces immediate traction and saves you from trying to awkwardly backward engineer SEO for your site.
- This makes it easier to craft a content strategy and prevent keyword overlaps that lower overall rankings in SERPs.
- It can make sense for websites with a limited number of pages, all naturally connected to each other.
So the more disorganized your website architecture is, the less context Google has about your webpages and their relation to one another. But you’ll know from context that there should be a bed in the bedroom, a toilet in the bathroom, and so on. Website architecture refers to the hierarchy of the pages on your site and how each page is connected. There has been a great deal of controversy around the Accelerated Mobile Pages framework.
Navigation or menu web structure
It can help them easily find the information or products they seek – or not. Website Architecture is how a website’s pages are structured and linked together. An ideal Website Architecture helps users and search engine crawlers easily find what they’re looking for on a website.
