Sometimes, the website structure is displayed in the address tab for ease of perception. In this post, I’m going to tell you what the website structure is, why it’s crucial to optimize it, and how to analyze structure using Netpeak Spider. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing.

With such descriptions, it saves so much time for your visitors and makes it easier for them to find what they’re looking for. So, you frustratedly go back to the search engine to find a product similar to what you wanted. But there’s a problem; you can’t find the product page because the website owner cleverly decided to give it a fancy name. Then by sheer luck, you bump into the product page, but the website offers countless other products.

• Keyword research is not only necessary for optimizing your titles and descriptions but it can provide you with ideas on how to structure your website.
• Create a logical system of directories for categories and subcategories of content.
• Create a SILO content structure – hierarchical organization of your content by topics.
• But there’s another problem; you can’t seem to find the “Buy Now” button.
• In this post, I’m going to tell you what the website structure is, why it’s crucial to optimize it, and how to analyze structure using Netpeak Spider.

Your home page is at the top of the hierarchy and below you can have 2 or 3 levels before you reach the bottom of the hierarchy – your product pages. A well organized and defined site structure is crucial for this process to work as planned. Not only they can attract more clicks to the most important pages of your website but they are also good for branding. Use descriptive keywords and avoid long numerical strings like session IDs. Sitelinks are an asset to credibility, branding, and click-thru rates.

Create A Hierarchy With Your Content

If you understand how your audience looks for your solutions, you can build a search-optimized website from the ground up. Even if you’re restructuring an existing website, doing keyword research upfront produces immediate traction and saves you from trying to awkwardly backward engineer SEO for your site. Before you can start planning the structure of your website, you’ll want to identify the scope and scale of the project. Websites with a clear organizational structure have defined places for different types of content. This makes it easier to craft a content strategy and prevent keyword overlaps that lower overall rankings in SERPs. In this case, the editor’s note is supposed to merely provide extra direction for the director of the play; it is not supposed to have extra semantic meaning.

Add different types of linking – contextual linking, use various scripts. To do so, select the necessary part of the structure in the chart or the entire structure, copy and paste it without formatting in XMind (Shift + Ctrl + V). The ‘Site Structure’ report in the Netpeak Spider allows you to comprehensively analyze your website or competitor’s website in terms of structure in the URL segments. To transfer the website structure data to a tab, use the ‘Extended Copy’ feature. You will be notified about successful copying in the bottom right corner of the screen.

If you offer several pieces of content that cover different aspects of the same subject in great depth and link them together, you’re helping search engines recognize your business as an industry expert. Your website structure plays an essential role in how visitors experience your offering and search engines crawl your site. But if you have to handle 20 pages and 200 images, that organization model can turn into a serious problem and give you a hard time trying to find the documents among so many images.

Arrange Your Content In An Eye

The rule of thirds dictates that you divide up your page into three distinctive parts both vertically and horizontally to get nine equal squares. What’s more, it helps you see how readers lose interest the further down they read your content. Here’s a heat map reaffirming the left to right reading style in the “F” reading pattern.

Otherwise, you’re essentially guessing about what could be beneficial for improving UX, which leaves the success of your project up to chance. When you add a group of new pages, you can create a new category page and link to them from there. Once you have clarity on your best prospects, it’s time to engage in some large-scale keyword research. With a simple site architecture, content is arranged in a logical hierarchy. If the same information were scattered throughout your website with no apparent relationship between those pages, it would be harder for a search engine to evaluate your industry expertise. Whether you’re building a new site or thinking of updating your original one, it pays to take a good look at site architecture and consider your options before you get started.

Start With Navigation

A good idea to solve the problem presented in the previous paragraph is to use the previous models but as sub-sections of the website, thus having a small website for each artist displaying his work in it. In this scheme, each artist will have a directory with all his images and pages properly arranged. Let’s take a better look at this, so we can then continue with a clearer image. Before building the website structure, you need to do keyword research that will help you know more about the needs of your target audience. With an increase or decrease in the number of categories and subcategories, the website structure should remain the same. Linear structure – all website pages are connected linearly and are located one after another.

Instead of publishing a random collection of pages and posts, establishing an SEO-friendly site architecture can guide users to your content and help Google index it. The best position for the search bar is at the top right corner of your website. This way, it’s easy for your visitors to find it fast to get what they’re looking for. The next item that’s a real gem, especially for eCommerce websites, is an intuitive search bar. The search bar should have autofill and auto-suggest features to make it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Now, imagine taking your potential customers through that with a website that’s poorly designed.

So what you can do in such case, is to start grouping the files in some way and place them in different directories to make your site a little easier to manage and update. To display additional internal links of your website in the search results, it’s necessary to create a correct structure. Bear in mind that you’ll have a few elements common to most pages — such as the navigation menu, and the footer content. If your site is for a business, for example, it’s a good idea to have your contact information available in the footer on each page.

To help you visualize how a hierarchical structure looks like, have a look at the following diagram. The problem is that you cannot specify which pages of your website to include as sitelinks. Updating your site architecture for website structure SEO can be well worth the effort and pay dividends that will help your business thrive for years to come. That being said, it’s a complicated endeavor that requires a deep well of expertise across several technical disciplines.

Moreover, it should be unmistakable, so your potential customers don’t miss it. Now, you can boost your trustworthiness in your visitors’ eyes by adding social proof. Social proof helps your visitors see how your products have solved other people’s needs which means that they can solve their needs too. So, structure your content in a way that makes reading from left to right easier. These are some of the questions you should have in mind when creating your website because they help you make your visitors have a wonderful user experience.

Additionally, an effective website architecture allows you to create pages that answer specific questions searchers might have. More pages that contain beneficial information related to your business will help you acquire more quality backlinks. Plus, if you create a website structure that mirrors your sales funnel, every step of the customer journey will lead effortlessly to the next. Whether it’s transitioning from reading a blog post to signing up for deals or moving from a FAQ page to make a purchase, a logical site structure greases the wheels of conversion on your website. Site architecture is a foundational principle of technical search engine optimization .

Make Your Cta Simple

A breadcrumb menu is shown at the top of a page and it consists of a number of internal links that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to the previous section or the home page of your website. It has to be easy to navigate, easy to crawl and it’s the starting point to offer a great experience for your users. The only way to have your sitelinks featured in search results is to have a website with a clearly defined hierarchy.

Website Architecture Seo

Website architecture is the hierarchical structure of pages on your website. It describes the way you categorize and interlink content on your site. The ideal website structure guides a user to the information they need and helps search engines differentiate between pages. This article looks into how to plan a basic website structure, and write the HTML to represent this structure.

Planning A Simple Website

Our proprietary methodology combines the best of technology and people to deliver business-impacting results with breakneck speed. We’re driven by a passion to deliver great work and help great companies. Define your topic clusters, determine a pillar page for each content group, and then drill down to plan supporting content for each pillar. Build your site navigation to mirror the search intent you’ve identified for your customers at each stage of their buying journey. That way, you’ll create an efficient funnel that effortlessly delivers visitors from search to purchase. But, regardless of whether you’re at the sketch-on-a-napkin planning stage or you already have a website up and running stage, you’ll want to pause to consider who you’re building your website for.

Pages with keywords from the same supergroup should be combined into one structure. Informational or semantic structure – it gives an understanding of what kind of pages are there on the website and how they cover semantic demand. From experience, when you create the user-sitemap page, it will help you understand if your website is well structured or if you need to make any structural changes to improve it. A good user-sitemap page should display all important categories and subcategories of a website is a single page so that users can find easily what they want. For all types of websites, it’s always a good practice to create a user-sitemap page.

Then any further explanation should follow for those visitors who need more information to make a decision. A hierarchy helps you to put more emphasis on the content you want your customers to see first. So, making sure that your content proves to your visitors that you’re the go-to source for all they need is paramount. Your content is what your visitors will consider when determining if what you offer is exactly what they need. Your menu bar is almost always the first point of interaction with your web visitors. So, the menu bar items have to be precise and not leave room for misinterpretation.

With the help of tools like Optimal Workshop’s Treejack, you can analyze visitor behavior and identify roadblocks in their customer journey. These words send an important signal about the content on the other end of the link. If there are technical reasons you can’t structure your URLs to mirror your website architecture, there’s still tremendous benefit to structuring your web content with pillar pages and topic clusters. The clusters of subtopics you’ll create within these pillars to provide more in-depth information and rank for long-tail keywords. So, you should make it clear and straightforward for your visitors to know exactly what they’re getting.

A well-defined structure will help users find what they want fast , and search engine crawlers will be able to crawl, understand and index your website more efficiently. Having an SEO friendly URL structure helps both users and search engines navigate a website. In case of an ecommerce store, sitelinks will show your main categories, like this example from Best Buy. Ideally, your site structure will allow relevant content to sit within the same subdirectory as the pillar page it supports. This effectively creates a URL “silo” that describes how a subtopic is related to a pillar page and orients the user within your topic clusters.

When you want to launch a new page, you simply add it to an existing category and link to it from that category page. Category pages make it easy to maintain your website’s organizational structure over the long term. Create a logical system of directories for categories and subcategories of content. Before you start updating your site structure, you’ll want to zero in on what you hope to achieve. In some cases, revamping the structure of a website is part of a whole website migration plan, in which case you’ll also want to be prepared for the technical details required for a site move.

Planning your content structure also allows you to strategize how you’ll link related information together. The more links go to a page, the higher its priority within the website, and the more times the search engine crawls it. Search engines will do their utmost to crawl any website without specific directions. If you work out a clear structure, it’ll ease search engine’s understanding of your website.

Correct website structure positively influences search engine ranking and users’ perception of your website. Give special attention to your mobile version and make sure that the experience of the users’ is optimized for mobile. While on mobile they only show the Extensions store option since displaying the full list of products would create a mess and this is not user friendly. Make use of side menus – When a user selects a particular category from the main menu, you can show them a landing page with a side menu to help them find the products they want. If you haven’t read my previous post on how to do keyword research for an ecommerce website, I suggest you read it before continuing to the next steps. Victorious is an SEO agency that leverages a wealth of performance data and market research to create scientifically-driven SEO strategies.

It is one of the better sources for procuring ideas to create a better online presence. To make sure that Google can ‘interpret’ breadcrumbs correctly, you need to add the relevant schema. Not only it’s an SEO ranking factor, but it’s another way to gain user’s trust. https://globalcloudteam.com/ The other options are also available so that you can choose to change category without having to go back to the menu. Keyword research is not only necessary for optimizing your titles and descriptions but it can provide you with ideas on how to structure your website.