What is WebSite Structure & How to design an SEO-friendly Website structure?

With today’s fast-paced lifestyles, nobody likes to wait for long or feel lost while searching for information online. Therefore, as a marketer, it is crucial to structure your website in an easy-to-navigate manner to retain the interest of your audience. And site structure is what we will talk about today.

What is Website Structure?

Site structure or website architecture refers to how your website is designed or how various pages on your website are connected for excellent user experience. This is important not just from the user’s perspective but also for search engine optimization.

What are the types of website structure?

• Hierarchical Model

This is the most common and preferred type of website structure. This is also known as a tree structure, where there is a parent page with a broad set of information, and it is further categorized into child pages with detailed information.

• Sequential Model

As the name says, this allows the user to browse in a sequential manner. Here, the user can only travel in a forward or backward direction.

• Matrix Model

This was popularly used in the early years of the internet. It provided the user with many relevant links under various topic groups, allowing them to choose where they wanted to go next.

• Database Model

This is a dynamic approach to website architecture, integrating a database with a search. With this website structure, users can create experiences based on their search query.

What is the importance of Website structure?

• A smooth user experience

If your website is appealing and informative and has hassle-free navigation, users will want to spend more time on it, increasing the dwell-time and decreasing the bounce time. This will, in turn, indicates to Google that your website is an excellent result to be displayed for a search query and can boost your rankings.

• Good site structure can get you sitelinks

Sitelinks on a SERP show your website’s important pages. These are of a great SEO advantage and can improve clickthrough rate, better your brand’s reputation and help you rank better on SERPs. Google awards sitelinks to websites with excellent site structure. Currently, you cannot add a sitelink on your own.

• Improved Crawling 

A properly designed website structure with good internal linking will help not only users but also crawlers that crawl your website by letting them discover important pages.

• Prevents from competing with your website

Sometimes, you may have different blog posts written around the same topic. If your site is designed correctly, it can help you avoid having competing webpages and keyword cannibalization.

How to have a good website structure? 

Hierarchical structures based on parent and child pages are generally considered a good website structure. Some of its elements include:

• Homepage

The homepage of your website can be referred to as a central place from where the whole website is navigated. It’s important for your homepage to include links to all important pages of your website and guide the users to information that they need.

• Navigation

Navigation or the menu of your website helps visitors understand your website structure. Therefore, categorise all the pages systematically so that the users can easily identify the information they are looking for. The best way to create good navigation is by using short phrases and simple language for the content.

• Categories

Categories and subcategories play a crucial role in creating an adequate website structure. Make sure to craft different categories for different types of content. Group similar content together and create a category and further add a sub-category if required. For instance, if you sell books, you can create categories for different genres of books. 

• Individual Pages

Individual pages and blogs must be organised properly on your website so that the desired audience can effortlessly find the content they are searching for. The finest way to structure information on individual pages is with the use of meta tags, breadcrumb trails, and contextual links. 

• Breadcrumbs 

A breadcrumb trail helps add navigation to the posts and pages on your website. A breadcrumb trail consists of clickable links that provide your website structure to users and also help them view different posts present on the website. Breadcrumbs provide a great way to improve the user experience of your website. 

• Tags 

Tags serve the purpose of grouping together similar content present on your website. Tags are quite similar to the categories present on your website. The only difference between categories and tags is that categories are further divisible into sub-categories. However, tags can not be subdivided and work only by grouping together similar content. 

How to design an SEO-friendly website structure?

• Strategize before you start

The best way to do things is to plan before executing them. Grab a paper and pen, and draw a rough sketch of how your website should look. You can list down various important pages, categories and product pages. This can help you get a better understanding of your website’s skeletal system. If you are starting a new website, it is good to consider implementing various SEO techniques at the designing stage itself. Choosing the right website model is important here. A flat site structure where all pages are just one click away from your home page can sound easy to implement. However, when asked about the flat site structure, this is how John Mueller responded:

“In general, I’d be careful to avoid setting up a situation where normal website navigation doesn’t work. So, we should be able to crawl from one URL to another URL on your website just by the links on the page.”

Here, he is saying that a flat website structure can cause crawl issues and difficulty in navigation for users. He further explained: 

“If that’s not possible then we lose a lot of contexts. So if we’re only seeing these URLs through your sitemap file then we don’t really know how these URLs are related to each other and it makes it really hard for us to be able to understand how relevant is this piece of content in the context of your website”

John’s remark makes it clear that using a hierarchical site structure helps Google understand your website better. 

• Website Symmetry is important

If you eliminate the colors, fonts, kernel, graphics and images from a website, a good website structure is what remains. And maintaining symmetry in the structure can be satisfying to the user. Keep your category count between 2 to 7 and try to add an equal number of sub-categories in each category. Symmetricity will prevent your website from looking uneven.

• URL structure

The URL structure should follow the page hierarchy. If you already have a good website structure, this won’t be much of an issue. However, pay close attention to the ‘slug’. A slug refers to the tail end of the URL. Using a readable name in the slug instead of the ID number of the page helps crawlers and users to better read and understand the content of the page.

• Internal Linking

Internal linking is a crucial SEO technique which helps you connect one webpage to another on your website. This enhances the user experience as important pages are accessible with fewer clicks. Implementing a good internal linking strategy can help with a good flow of link juice within the domain. Thus, your website can rank better on the SERP.

• W3C Validation

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) validation is a process to check the compliance of the HTML and XHTML documents of your website to well-formed markup. W3C validation ensures that the site works the same in all browsers.

• Use suitable JavaScript framework along with HTML and CSS

When designing your website, using HTML and CSS are the safest methods. However, using JavaScript can make your site appealing to the users. You need to use a suitable JavaScript framework for your website. With the introduction of the Google Evergreen bot, the crawler can now render more than 1000 web platform features that it could not earlier, making SEO easier. 

Conclusion

A website structure is a result of precise thinking and organization. It is a vital aspect of SEO and should be done before the creation of your website. However, if your website is live, you can always rework on the design and improve its structural organization for SEO. It can help both the users and crawlers with easy navigation. So, do not hesitate to invest your time and resources to create an SEO-friendly website. 

Consider the above suggestions to structure your site and lets us know how it worked for you.

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