How to Create an SEO-Friendly Website Structure

But, if some product lines end up much smaller than others, you might want to merge them. When your business goal or website changes, your menu also needs to change. When you start thinking about restructuring your site, planning things visually will pay off. https://globalcloudteam.com/ Beware not to try to link to too many pages from your homepage, because that will cause clutter. And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere. If you want to optimize your homepage further, there are a lot of other things you can do.

seo site structure

They have supporting content pieces clustered around them that dive into more specific information and link back to the pillar. Great examples of hierarchical website structure are news sites that divide their homepage by categories, which lead down to individual posts and pages. URL structure – The format of your URLs is also part of website architecture and especially important for search engines.

Add Contextual Links

Then link from these related posts to your cornerstone articles, and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll make sure that your most important pages have both the most links and how to plan a website structure the most relevant links. Categories can become too large when you write a lot about one specific subject and less about others. At some point, you should divide the big category into two smaller categories.

seo site structure

The root is the home directory of a website, where your main page exists. On the Google Search Central blog, Google suggests that going mobile will likely cost time and money if you had not considered this when you built your website. The amount of work involved can depend on your developer resources, IT expertise, and business models – especially if your site is ecommerce related. Core Web Vitals are part of Google’s page experience update, and when optimizing images, in particular, they could impact rank. Statistics indicating a positive experience validates the search results to Google.

Assign parent categories

When you plan the structure at the development stage, you can analyze what exactly your visitors need and how to simplify their journey. Because no one wants to spend eternity searching for relevant content. In addition, a properly designed structure and well-thought-out navigation encourage users to visit more pages.

  • Intuitive navigation features like a mega menu, filters and faceted search enable customers to quickly find what they want.
  • On top of that, because they have no unique content, these default category pages are deemed “low value” by Google.
  • If one gets too large, consider whether it makes sense to divide it into two.
  • However, while it’s really easy to follow this rule at the beginning of a site’s life, it’s much harder to stick with it as your site grows.
  • There are two main approaches by which a website can be structured.
  • The structure and organization directly affect how quickly the users can find the information they need and the bots can scan the pages.

Your hierarchy should be no more than 2 or 3 levels deep – Don’t overcomplicate your site hierarchy but keep it simple. All pages of your website have to accessible from the homepage in less than 3 clicks. Ideal Site Structure for a Small Business WebsiteNotice that you have a main category for departments and a main category for the blog with several sub-categories.

What is site structure?

You might want to spend time on URL optimization if your URLs have incoherent numbers and symbols. URLs matter because they give weight to the overall authority of your top-level domain and are a minor ranking factor. A well-crafted URL uses hyphens to separate words, as well as lowercase letters, and avoids underscores and spaces. Even though URLs seem like an afterthought, they’re actually significant for your website’s UX and SEO.

With our services and training, we help small businesses succeed with marketing regardless of their budgets. See if the new search function works as expected and pulls up relevant results. In addition to updating or creating your site structure, you want the right URL structure. URL structure is the order of information in any URL on your website. After you’ve gotten a feel for your competitors’ structure, you can use that to support your own audience. The best site architecture for your website is what serves your visitors’ and clients’ needs.

Should I Change My URLs To Match What You’ve Been Teaching In This Post?

Be prepared that creating a website structure for large websites can take a lot of time. Structuring or restructuring your content doesn’t always have high priority within everything you have to do. Especially when you blog a lot, or add other content regularly, it might feel like a chore.

If you consider the recommendations above, you will likely satisfy both your users and search engines alike. You can also write to us, and our specialists will help you develop your site’s structure, taking into account all the project’s features. A good site architecture makes it easier for search engines to crawl it, allowing them to find new pages faster and to consider changes on those previously crawled. This is especially important if your site is large and contains many categories and subcategories. The internal link structure on your site also helps crawlers understand the content you want to put on a pedestal. This supports differences in ranking on search results pages for similar content.

SEO-Friendly Website Structure: 6 Simple Steps to Make One

But it would most certainly miss some pages and wouldn’t be backed up by much data. The most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to visualizing your website is to create your structure flat, not deep. Looking to increase conversion rates and enhance your SEO efforts?

seo site structure

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