Do you wish to rank higher on Google?
Today, there are millions of websites out there. Some manage to get ranked high on Google, while others struggle to stay relevant. To gain traction and improve your organic traffic, it’s vital to build a solid website structure that aligns well with Google’s algorithm and understand the reasons why website structure is important for SEO.
Google has updated its webmaster guidelines and now requires sites to follow strict standards to improve their rankings on search engines. They also stress the importance of building an authoritative site, which means having high-quality content on every page.
What Is Site Structure
Website structure refers to how information is presented on your site. Content structure means how each piece of information is placed in relation to others on the page. There should be an obvious flow between each piece of information on the page. This can include internal links going back to other pages or subpages.
Your solid website structure should be organized into different sections or levels based on the type of content, such as blog articles, images, audio/video, etc. All these things need to be linked together, ensuring the user knows what he’s looking for. You want to make sure the URL structures are easy to remember and understand.
Visitors should be able to navigate through your website easily and crawl through. Crawling ensures that your site is always updated and gives you better search engine optimization.
A solid site structure focuses on two purposes: user experience and search engine optimization.
User experience makes it easy for website visitors to navigate and see what they want to see. SEO makes it easy to let search engine bots crawl your website and ensure Google indexes each page.
Build a site with both of those in mind. If you’re going to do anything, make sure that users and search engine crawlers find everything together. This way, if a user and crawler happen to be at any place, they’ll still understand what’s happening.
Why Does an Ideal Site Structure Matter?
Probably the best reason to have a well-structured site is to provide the most optimal experience to your users. Whether or not SEO is involved, you’d still want to emphasize it for your users’ sake. Someone visiting your website should always know where they’re on your website and where they can go to find what they’re looking for. Likewise, your users should always know where they can find what they need.
Consider for a moment if you’re visiting a hardware store for your first time, and none the aisles were labeled, and there was no one else around to help you find the things you needed. Would you come back here again? Would you leave and go to a competitor who could help you find what you’re looking for? Well, your website is no different.
Why Website Structure Is Important for SEO
Website architecture is an important component of your website. You should make sure that your site is accessible to your real users and that your site is crawlable by search engines.
An Ideal Site Structure Is Made for Search Engines
How your site is structured gives Google clues about where to get the most important information. Your website’s logical structure helps determine whether a search engine understands what your site is about. Google determines the relationships between the various pages by following these internal links.
SEO is useful for ranking on Google. An effective logical structure helps replicate logic across your website. You should submit an XML sitemap with all of your most important URL structures and then submit the URL for your sitemap as well.
Helps Google Understand Your Site More
How you structure your website helps Google understand what your website is mainly about or what you’re offering. Good site structuring makes it easy for search engines to find and list content quickly. On the other hand, a bad site structure means more work for Google. This leads to lower rankings.
To Declutter Your Site
A lot of things to tell you about organizing your relevant content. It will help if you start by making sure your titles are very descriptive and not too long because Google doesn’t like those. Next, you need to ensure that your meta descriptions follow the same rules as your titles. Also, there should be clear calls to action everywhere.
Your website should be organized into sections and sub-sections. Each section must have an introduction and conclusion. In addition, it would help ensure each page has a unique title, meta description, keywords, and alt tags. Make sure to use descriptive titles and descriptions. Use keywords that match the products or services you sell.
To Not Compete with Your Other Pages
Topical SEO is a big thing. Your site’s proper structure is a great way to showcase how different articles and blog posts are connected. You can group them by topics, which helps search engines understand what you’re about and give context to your relevant keywords.
Each post needs to be unique. Ensure that there is a clear difference between them. For example, if you have two blog posts on SEO, you must ensure that they are completely different. Otherwise, Google will rank both of them equally.
For User Experience
Navigation is very important for your site. Remember that your navigation must reflect your content. Your users should be able to find what they need without searching around. This will make them feel more comfortable while using your site. In addition, good usability will increase your conversion rates.
A well-built website should be easy to use and understand. Visitors shouldn’t have to think too hard about navigating or finding a piece of content. When people come across a badly designed site, they’ll leave quickly and not bother coming back. Search engines interpret user behavior when ranking a flat website structure. As a result, poorly designed websites may get fewer visitors than well-designed ones.
To Identify the Most Important Content
Your most important pages should be highlighted as those that should be ranked for competitive, high-volume keywords. Your site architecture should be designed around your most important blog content. You should make sure that you have a few pages that rank well for competitive keywords. These pages should be made up of the most important information about your business.
For Easy Crawl
Having a good website architecture makes it easy for search engines to crawl the site, find new pages and add changes to existing pages faster. Avoid having duplicate content on your site because it may devalue your rankings if Google finds out about it.
Site crawlability is an important factor in an SEO-friendly site structure. Subpages must lead visitors somewhere else within site. Websites should contain navigation links to help visitors navigate around the site. Pages should also be linked together by internal linking.
A lot of pages are linked together. Therefore, your internal link structure should be well-placed. This means you should ensure that there are no dead-ends while crawling through your website, or else people won’t be able to navigate your site easily.
Prevents Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization can prevent you from ranking better than you should. A clearly defined place on your page for a particular topic or article makes it easier to stop this problem from occurring.
For Usability
Your site should have easy-to-use navigation. Visitors could be able to find the products and services you offer easily. Make sure they understand how to navigate your site.
To Avoid Content Duplication
Duplicate content is harmful to search engine optimization because Google interprets it as spam. A focus on quality and unique content on the search results clearly defines how your decent site structure should be structured for an ideal SEO ranking.
The Google Search Console tool is useful for identifying and eliminating duplicate content on the site. It may be possible for you to repost duplicate content elsewhere online but do so carefully. As a general rule, avoid posting duplicate content on your website and any other website.
For Mobile Views
Mobile-friendly websites are becoming more important as more people access the Internet using smartphones and tablets. Your website needs to be designed to adapt to these new viewing habits. In addition, you may need to invest in tools and training to make your site look great on smaller screens.
For Site Performance
Website speed should be prioritized over everything else. Responsive web design is the best solution for a fast user experience. User experience is essential when designing any website. Therefore, it is important to get the right people involved in the process. These professionals include web designers, programmers, and SEO experts. These people play an important role in ensuring that your website is designed well.
For Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are part of Google’s page experience update. When optimizing images, in particular, they could impact rank. A shift in emphasis on CLS and the measurement of content loads jump is something website builders, design pros, and SEO pros – together – should be working on.
Google has given website owners and SEO pros a head’s up to prepare for this change; this is an ideal time to take action in preparation. Core Web Vitals may become one of the ranking factors in 2021, and at present, less than 15% of websites meet benchmark standards.
How to Create an Effective Site Structure
Show Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are short navigation menu items that help users navigate different web pages. Breadcrumbs force developers to organize their code into logical structures. Users can easily find the information they’re looking for using breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are helpful for your SEO efforts because they allow search engines to crawl your pages more easily.
Include Parent Categories
Make sure each content you publish belong to an assigned parent
If you do not assign parent pages for your content strategy, they will, by default, be assigned to the Home page. That can result in a very flat site structure, or the one with just a single Home page and dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages underneath it.
A Blog Post Should Have One Category Structure
Blogs should be categorized by topic and grouped according to topic clusters. This allows readers to search for specific key topics and get information about them. In addition, a common website structure needs to be well-balanced. This reduces the possibility of duplicate (or similar) content and helps you organize your content and SEO strategy.
Use Canonical Tags
Canonical tags help avoid duplicate content issues and ensure search engines know what pages to index. Make proper use of canonical tags whenever possible. Ensure that the canonical tag points towards the most simplified URL version.
Remove Unrelated Old Content
Old content that isn’t needed should be deleted. Likewise, pages that are outdated or irrelevant should be removed.
Check Your Information Hierarchy
The most common hierarchical structure is an inverted pyramid. The homepage sits on top, then there are a few top-level services pages, with additional pages below that to provide more details. Search engines use the website’s hierarchy to understand the importance of a page and how to rank them. A sensible hierarchy makes it easier for users to navigate the website and makes bread crumbs easier to implement.
Create a Sitemap
We need to create a sitemap that shows how our page should be organized. Next, we need to set up categories and subcategories to organize our content. Finally, we need to tell search engines about each product category and subcategory we created.
Link Pages to Other Relevant Pages
An internal linking structure is important because you want to ensure that every page on your site links back to the home page. This means that each of your top-level pages should be linked to the home page or another top-level page. You also want to make sure that any subpages directly inside those top-level pages are linked to the bottom of those pages.
Additionally, Google wants to see that each page contains content relevant to what the page is about. So, for example, if you’re creating a page about playing golf, don’t include information about how to get into shape in the main body text. Instead, include this information in the sidebar.
A site with several hundred pages should have links between related topics on the same or adjacent pages. Internal linking can help users easily navigate around the site, but it doesn’t hurt its search engine rankings.
To End
How your site is structured affects its ranking potential. If you don’t consider the way pages are organized, you risk hurting your rankings. Do you need help with your digital campaigns? ITD Web Design has experts that can help you with your online marketing issues. Give us a call to know more.