Every website has a structure. It can be a beautifully organized, streamlined structure or a jumbly, cluttered one. Unfortunately, most websites have the latter, featuring haphazardly linked content or strange or dead-end user pathways.
It can be frustrating for your visitors and difficult for search engines to index. However, if you’re careful and intentional with your website structure, you’ll create a site that achieves search excellence.
This article helps you understand the importance of a well-planned site structure and walks you through various tips to improve your site structure:
Site Structure And Its Importance
Think of your website structure as the architectural plan of a building. It provides a rough outline of your website. It shows how your site’s content— texts, videos, images, applications, and more— are interconnected, grouped, and presented to both human and non-human visitors. It establishes an order in which your content is discovered, accessed, understood, and used.
So, why is an organized site structure important?
For one, it makes it easier for your visitors to find what they’re looking for on your site. It eases visitor navigation and orientation which also helps increase user engagement by encouraging users to explore and spend more time on your site.
Secondly, a good site structure enhances your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by signaling your relevance and priorities to search engines. Search engines have several factors to consider to decide which pages to rank in a specific user query, including relevancy and usability. A well-structured site has organized content groups that can be easily indexed by search engines recognized when content is relevant.
Lastly, a good site structure also helps in the assessment of your site’s performance and health. Web developers can easily update, assess, and upgrade your website if they can easily understand, navigate and find content faster.
How To Improve Your Website Structure To Perfection
Here’s a list to know on how to improve website structure:
Create A Sitemap
Most websites, especially the more extensive ones, often contain vast amounts of content. It makes it challenging for users to find the information they need. Thus, if you haven’t developed your website yet, it is suggested that you include site mapping in your design strategy. However, creating a sitemap is just as essential for redesigns.
Site mapping simply means creating sitemaps that index the information on your website for easier website planning and increased usability. You can create sitemaps the old-school way. Grab some paper, a pen, and some rulers if you want, and start creating a hierarchy of boxes that highlights an intended user flow for every page.
Of, if you want the easier way, you can try using the best free sitemap generator. This online tool works by crawling a site or sitemap.xml file and is suitable for creating visual sitemaps at the start of a new website project or even during redesigning.
Avoid Dead Ends
Every content and post should have suggestions for further reading. It encourages people to stay on your website for a while. However, it’s necessary to avoid adding random links to every post. Your linking suggestions should always be relevant to the topic.
People reading about running shoes are probably interested in them. So, offer useful and valuable reading material on running shoes instead of linking out on a post about healing crystals.
Make sure that your internal links are directly tied to create a tightly-knit and well-integrated site structure. The more internal links you have across your pages, the better for your site structure and SEO. That’s because it tells search engines what pages are important and relevant and how to get there.
Also, there’s no need to complicate your internal linking. Every page on your site should have some link from and to another page on your site.
Group Related Content In Categories
Categorizing relevant groups can help significantly in improving your site structure. It makes it easier to find content and for search engines to crawl and index your site.
There are certain rules to follow when creating categories, either for your blog or the services and products you’re offering.
First off, you want to keep your equally-sized categories. If a category is too big, try to break them into two to three subcategories. Also, don’t hide your categories. Instead, add categories in the menu of your homepage and website for easier access.
In addition, you can use categories to create content relevancy, especially if it’s for blog sites. It helps search engines find relevant topics and allow you to build authority.
Utilize Breadcrumb Menus
Breadcrumb menus allow for an organized site structure and make your website SEO-friendlier. It is because breadcrumb menus help users navigate the site easily.
When using a breadcrumb menu on your site, make sure that it displays your site structure accurately. For instance, when you have that menu for a blog post, it should look like this:
Homepage > Fitness Category > Fitness Gear > Blog post
In simpler terms, the menu should display all levels. Also, consider adding structured data to describe it to search engines. In general, there’s a special type of markup for this type of menu, providing search engines with more info about your navigational structure. It helps enhance the appearance of your search listing on both mobile and desktop.
Don’t Forget URL Structure
Another element in developing a good site structure is your URL structure. In general, it should follow your navigation hierarchy.
For instance, following the above example of a breadcrumb menu structure, your URL or permalink structure should be like this:
myblogpost.com/fitness/fitness-gear/best-running-shoes
A quick tip: To organize your URL structure according to your site, you should have real words and the appropriate keyword coverage.
Conclusion
Having a professionally-looking website is not enough. If you’re serious about making your website, get noticed by search engines and become a good lead generator, then you need to start organizing your website structure. Follow the above tips to improve your site structure and expect a positive impact on your bottom line.
Digital Web Services (DWS) is a leading IT company specializing in Software Development, Web Application Development, Website Designing, and Digital Marketing. Here are providing all kinds of services and solutions for the digital transformation of any business and website.
