A website without structure is like a foggy, roadless town. Navigation? Next to impossible. Isolation? Inevitable. Frustration? Inescapable. After all, how can you know all the pages that exist on the site if you don’t have a guide to reach them? Even if you did know which pages were present in theory, how could you navigate to them? How would you find your way? Without a solid structure, a website is simply a random assortment of pages. To help ensure a positive user experience and allow search engines to crawl and index your site easily, it’s essential that you carefully consider the organization of your website. Let’s explore how you can optimize your site structure for SEO success.
Site Structure 101
What Is Site Structure?
“Site structure” is the organization and arrangement of a website’s pages. It defines the information hierarchy, provides easy navigation for search engine crawlers, and helps users find and explore the site’s content.
Why Is Site Structure Important?
Even if you’re not a particularly organized person, creating an organized site structure is well worth your while when it comes to SEO. A well-structured site provides numerous benefits:
- It enhances the user experience. Users are not an especially patient bunch, and you can’t expect them to find their way if you don’t offer a roadmap. In fact, they might even bounce if they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for. By organizing your pages well, you can help users navigate your site easily, engage with the content, and perhaps even spend more time on your site than they had originally planned.
- It helps search engines understand and index your site’s content. Web crawlers can easily crawl and scrape a well-structured website, which means that search engines like Google will be able to read and index it properly. The structure will help Google know where the most valuable content is located, what your pages are about, and more. This can help more users find your content.
- It can prevent your pages from competing with one another. Perhaps you have two pages about a similar topic, but one is more comprehensive and well-written. Without a solid site structure, Google may not be able to tell which of the pages is more important. It might accidentally rank the inferior page above the superior one. But if you organize your site appropriately, using internal links and placing the superior page higher in the hierarchical taxonomy, there won’t be any question about which page deserves the top spot on SERPs.
- It can evolve with your website. As you update your website with new content, you may want the new content to rank above the older content. And, of course, you don’t want Google to rank outdated or even deleted blog posts above fresh ones. So long as you adjust your site’s structure as your website evolves, you can ensure that search engines know which content you would prefer to rank more highly.
- It boosts SEO in several ways. Because of all the above benefits (enhancing the user experience, helping search engines understand and index your site, clearly demonstrating which pages are most important, etc.), a solid site structure may give you a boost when it comes to rankings, traffic, conversion rates, and more.
What Is the Ideal Site Structure for SEO?
Clearly, it’s critical to consider site structure for SEO. But how do you go about it? If you want to create a solid, dependable, well-organized website that can grow with you, start by thinking of it as a pyramid. At its most basic level, it should look a little something like this . . .
Home
The home page resides at the top, acting as the primary navigation hub.
Categories
From the home page, visitors should be able to access a few categories, i.e., the most important pages on your website. By providing links to these pages on your home page, you’re helping visitors reach them and telling Google that they’re important. Try to avoid choosing too many categories, tempting though it may be, as a cluttered homepage won’t do you any good.
Subcategories
Those categories may or may not be divided into subcategories, depending on the breadth of your content.
In some cases, you may wish to divide your subcategories into further subcategories. Try to avoid creating many layers of subcategories, however. Generally, it’s best for the path from the homepage to an individual page to be relatively short. For example, take a look at this navigation path:
homepage > category > subcategory > individual page
This is relatively short, allowing users to reach individual pages without too much fuss.
Now look at this path:
homepage > category > subcategory > subcategory > subcategory > subcategory > subcategory > individual page
The multitude of subcategories creates a “deep” site structure that’s bad for user experience. With this plan, users must click through many pages to access certain individual pages. Sometimes this is called crawl depth or click depth. When you have a deep crawl depth, users may get frustrated by how long it’s taking to reach the desired page. They may even decide that it’s not worth the effort and leave your site altogether. Plus, Google considers crawl depth when deciding how important a page it is. If you can reach a page with two clicks from the home page, Google assumes the page must be more important than a page that requires six clicks.
So, try to create a flatter structure with fewer clicks between the homepage and individual pages. Ideally, the click depth for all pages on your site will be four clicks or less.
Individual Pages
Finally, within the subcategories, you may have individual pages or blog posts.
Make sure that all individual pages on your website are a part of the site structure — i.e., connected to at least one other page on your website through an incoming link. If no internal links point to a certain page, that page becomes an “orphan page,” hovering off on its own. Google struggles to reach and rank orphan pages, which means users are unable to access them unless they type the URL into their search bar directly. And who does that these days? If you want people to see a page, you absolutely must link to it.
Navigation: Providing a Roadmap
Once you’ve organized your content into a logical site structure, you need to create a navigation path. Features like menus, breadcrumbs, categories, tags, and internal links will help you guide viewers and web crawlers around your website.
Menus
A menu is like a remote, helping visitors quickly click around to different parts of your website. It also helps them understand how your site is structured. If your site is modest, you may have just one menu that shows every page on the website. But if you have a larger site, you may wish to create a second menu to ensure all the important pages of your website are easily accessible. Try to limit the number of links you include in your primary menu, as you may overwhelm visitors and search engines.
If you want to create a more comprehensive menu, consider placing it in your footer:
With a menu like this, visitors can easily see all the pages hidden within categories and subcategories. This allows them to speedily jump directly from the home page to a specific individual page. And because this menu is located in the footer, you don’t have to worry about it cluttering up the prime real estate at the top of your home page.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are links, often found at the top of a page, that show the path to the current page. For example, the breadcrumb path to this page looks like this: Home > Blog > Site Structure for SEO. Not only do breadcrumbs help users understand where they are within your website (and allow them to backtrack to broader pages), but they also help Google understand your site’s structure.
Categories & Tags
If you have product pages or a blog on your website, creating categories will also be helpful. These categories should be broad, especially when you’re first getting started. As your website evolves, you can create more categories as needed. You can also create subcategories if one category grows too large, forming a hierarchal structure. However, avoid creating too many categories; you want your content navigation to be focused.
You may also wish to create tags if you have a large number of blog posts or product pages. Although similar to categories in function, tags are typically more detailed and plentiful, and they cannot be hierarchical. Again, try not to create too many tags. Make sure that every tag is used at least twice, and avoid creating tags that are too similar.
Because categories are broader, many websites only use categories. But if you need a more detailed taxonomy, you may wish to use both categories and tags. Using only tags isn’t recommended.
To learn more about these taxonomies, check out our blog post The Difference Between Categories and Tags.
Internal Links
While all of the navigational tools we’ve discussed so far technically include internal links, it’s important to also include internal links within the copy of your pages and blog posts when relevant. For example, in the last paragraph, I linked to a relevant blog post about categories and tags. This sort of internal link helps interested readers learn more about the topic at hand. When it comes to creating a solid site structure for SEO, internal links are also beneficial, as Google uses them to learn more about the pages of your website. If you create many internal links to a particular page, Google will understand that you think that page is important.
When creating internal links, make sure that the anchor text describes the page you’re linking to, as Google will use it to learn more about the page. Google also uses the surrounding text for more insight, which is why it’s best to only use internal links when they’re truly relevant.
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An experienced web developer can help you craft an organized, logical, and seamless site structure for SEO success. And fortunately, these days, designing a site structure for SEO goes hand in hand with designing a site structure for optimal user experience. And if a site structure works well for search engines and your audience, it will obviously work well for you, right? It’s a win-win-win situation.
If you’re hoping to build a beautiful, effective website that will rank on Google, contact 417 Marketing for help. Our team of knowledgeable, creative, and passionate professionals specializes in SEO, web design and maintenance, and Google Ads, and we have successfully completed over 700 websites since our inception in 2010. Contact us and learn more about what we can do for your company.