The Importance of Website Structure for SEO
1. What is website structure?
Website structure refers to how different pages of a website are linked and presented to each other. Building a good website structure is crucial for both visitors and search engines. It can help visitors browse the site easily and enable crawlers to search web pages for new content, thereby improving the website's ranking.
2. Different types of website structures
There are various types of website structures, with the most common being flat structure and deep structure. Flat structure design allows users and search engines to browse the entire website with just a few clicks on the homepage, while deep structure requires more time to find specific information.
The following are four main types of website structure:
1. Hierarchical model: Similar to a tree structure, the homepage is the main trunk, and various categories and pages are branches. Suitable for websites that need to classify large amounts of information without appearing chaotic.
2. Sequential model: Suitable for creating separate web pages, guiding users through a step-by-step process, suitable for small businesses and websites with minimal information.
3. Matrix Model: Display content in word cloud format, suitable for websites with large amounts of data but a single focus, helping users select the content they are interested in.
4. Database Model: A dynamic website structure method based on page metadata to classify content and sites, requiring professional knowledge to organize content.
3. Why is website structure important for SEO?
An SEO-friendly website structure can make it easier for search engines to find and determine the importance of pages, and also helps evaluate page performance. Search engines usually decide on rankings based on the user-friendliness of the website, so establishing a friendly website structure is very important.
4. Methods for creating a website structure conducive to SEO
1. Plan Website Structure: Develop a structural plan before starting to build the website to ensure that no content is overlooked.
2. Consider Information Hierarchy: Use an inverted pyramid structure so that search engines and users can understand the importance of the page.
3. Use Heading Hierarchy: Optimize H1, H2 tags, including keywords suitable for the business, ensuring a clear and concise title structure.
Introduction to website structure and its importance for SEO. By properly planning and optimizing the website structure, you can improve the website's ranking in search engines, attract more traffic and visitors.
Determine the priority of URLs in the navigation bar.
The website navigation is often filled with unnecessary pages that serve no purpose—these pages do not increase traffic, attract visitors, or lead to conversions. When you remove these pages from the website, it becomes easier to use, thus improving conversion rates and engagement. It also helps the remaining pages on the website rank higher in search results, as Google's robots can crawl the website more easily.
People don't have time to search on your website. Guide them down the path you want them to take, and make the entire process easy, interesting, and enjoyable. For your navigation menu, consider adding/removing unnecessary links, focusing on the most valuable pages (consider multiple navigation menus where meaningful).
Homepage should be reached within 3 clicks at most.
Using the correct internal links is an important technique to help optimize website SEO structure. Internal links help connect your website and assist users in navigating your website correctly. If you link your website and it takes too many clicks from the homepage to reach a subpage, it can have a real negative impact on user experience and SEO. Ensure that the URL is a maximum of 3 clicks away from the homepage - over 40% of experts also recommend this approach.
Creating a website structure with a crawl depth of more than 3 clicks from the homepage will have a negative impact on optimization work because it makes it harder for users and search engine crawlers to reach deeply buried pages on the website. Since crawlers have to crawl billions of pages, they will not crawl that deeply. Therefore, having your conversion pages [close to your] homepage is very important.
Display Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are short navigation menus typically displayed on pages other than the homepage, and they can help users navigate your website.
My suggestion is to always use breadcrumbs as a form of navigation, it not only makes your SEO structure cleaner, but also forces you to think logically when building a website. It can help visitors easily find the information they are looking for. In addition, breadcrumbs help Google's crawlers better structure the site, leading to additional links being displayed in the SERP.
Link to other relevant pages on your website
Do not forget to create an internal linking strategy, as your own website pages have a great influence and can affect their SEO rankings. You want to map the 'page ranking' flow of the entire website, including the anchor text you use to link to each page. This can be very positively done for keyword optimization, without incurring Google penalties. Use descriptive internal links! Simply using 'click here' or 'more info' and then linking these words to the target page is not enough, but helps Googlebot clearly understand the content of the target page.
Use pillar and cluster method
When building your website, identify your conversion pages or pages you want to rank for high traffic keywords. Then make sure you have content supporting the conversion pages and linking back to them. This helps signal to Google that you are focusing on these conversion pages, and that the rest of your content should point to these pages as the high-authority pages on your site.
Internal linking is a great way to optimize website structure and improve SEO. You can follow this process: 'Look for pages and articles on your website that discuss the same topic. Then, add internal links between them using relevant SEO. This will enhance your SEO while helping search engines understand your website structure. One easily overlooked suggestion is cross-linking. Make sure your high traffic blog articles link to your product pages and other related articles for quicker navigation by users and crawlers.'
Assign parent category
When you publish content, you should ensure that all pages and posts, except for a few pages and posts, have a consciously specified parent. If you do not assign content to a parent page, they will be assigned to the homepage by default. This may lead to a very flat site structure with just one homepage and dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages underneath it. Google cannot determine which pages are most important. Visitors will have a hard time finding the content they are looking for on your website, and you will not be able to easily determine the performance of grouping pages like services and blog articles.
Classify products according to search intent
When creating an SEO-friendly website structure, it is essential to group products and purchasing styles logically together. For example, if you are selling personalized socks, ideally you would want to increase the product's exposure by capturing as many relevant keywords around how people can find your website. In addition to SEO optimized product pages, you could also consider using top-level categories like 'Shop by Recipient' or 'Shop by Occasion' and then setting target pages underneath, such as 'Mother's Day Socks' or 'Birthday Socks'. These optimized pages can then start matching the 'search intent' of potential customers.
Stick to one category for each blog post
If your website or blog is running on WordPress, I strongly recommend assigning a category to each blog post, as this reduces the likelihood of duplicate content and helps you organize your content strategy. If you are strong in some areas and weak in others, you can reconsider your plan and find a balance.
Delete individual pages
Recommend avoiding having only one item on the website. Having individual product or subcategory pages will increase unnecessary clicks and be detrimental to SEO. Deleting unnecessary pages can make the website structure smoother, reducing competition with the final destination pages.
URL structure organized by category
Have the main pillar pages of the website on the root domain, build supporting articles based on the URL. Changing WordPress' permalinks structure from date-based to only blog posts can help maintain a fresh and uniform URL for articles.
Create a sitemap
The sitemap tells people (and Google) how to navigate the website documents. Creating an XML sitemap helps search engines understand the website structure, identify important and valuable pages.
Delete old content
Deleting unnecessary old content, especially unused old products in e-commerce websites, helps optimize the website structure and improve SEO effectiveness.
Group similar keywords on one page
Conduct extensive keyword research, group similar keywords on one page to build an SEO-friendly website structure and enhance user experience.
Check competitors' website structure
Studying competitors' website structures, borrowing their experiences and practices can help optimize one's own website structure and enhance SEO effectiveness.
Using standardized tags
Correct use of standardized tags to reduce duplicate content and ensure search engines index the website correctly. Particularly important for e-commerce websites.
Optimizing for people, not robots
When designing website structures, consider user experience, provide simple and clear navigation paths to improve user experience and SEO rankings.
Keeping it simple
Keeping website structure simple, ensuring coverage of key topics, providing clear internal linking paths to enhance user experience and SEO effectiveness.