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

You’ve already analyzed which keywords work for your rivals. Now, it’s time to add more research to those observations and https://globalcloudteam.com/ collect a full keyword list for your website. An effective structure helps make content more relevant for search intents.

Ranking

In addition, make sure that what you include in your menu delivers what it promises. Clearly label everything, and when users click on something, make sure they land on the page they expect. If you have a very large website, it often makes sense to further divide your categories how to plan a website structure into subcategories. For example, as an online shop, merely having a product category named “pants” is probably not going to be too helpful. You should at least divide it into “women’s pants” and “men’s pants”, and likely even further into “jeans”, “shorts”, etc.

There are other types of structures which are useful depending on a business’s products and portfolio. However, we recommend using a hierarchical structure if you want your visitors and search engine bots to instantly grasp what your webpages are about. The rule of thumb here is that every page should have a link pointing to it and coming from it. Search crawlers find and index websites by going from one page to another, and they do so by following the links, unless they are told otherwise. Smart internal linking will help crawlers find all the content on your website. A well-planned structure is what turns a messy set of webpages into a site loved by users and search engines.

How to Do a Basic Website Audit to Improve SEO and UX (in 10 Steps)

You’ll likely need to continue using the current version of your site as your developer builds the new structure in a staging environment. Second, imagine how some phrases come up more often, like information technology or IT services. Third, picture how there are dozens of phrases that are used less often, like default gateway or destination address. Putting your audience first, in this context, means a list of things — all of which relate to best practices for online content writing. A sitemap can do wonders for optimizing the structure and accessibility of website pages.

When optimizing your URL structure, it’s important to consider trailing slashes, HTTPS, and If you haven’t done an audit of your site structure yet, then this is a task to add at the top of your SEO checklist. Once you are done making changes, login to your Google search console and submit your updated sitemap to Google. You can optionally request a ‘Fetch as Google’, to force Google to process your changes faster. Ideal Site Structure for an eCommerce WebsiteOn top of the structure we have the homepage and then the content grouped into several categories.

Use Keywords to Plan Your Web Page Structure

There are several types of site structures, and you need to consider your website’s specifics and size to choose the right one. It’s best to pay special attention to the creation of the structure as it will help you avoid problems with future search engine optimization. Think about how the pages on your website are connected to each other, particularly how they branch off from the homepage and are grouped in deeper catalogs.

• When your site is complicated to work with and things are hard to find, visitors will get frustrated and leave.
• This can help boost your User Experience and improve user engagement.
• Breadcrumbs, schema, and structured data formats all help here.
• A sequential site structure has a linear, A-to-B path of usability.
• This lack of organization also makes it more difficult to navigate for users at times.
• It should also help your whole organization engage better with users and create an experience aligned with your business goals, product, and service structure.

A matrix site structure displays a website’s content in a format similar to a word cloud. If you’re unfamiliar with word clouds, first picture all of the phrases on a given website, like a business services blog. Hierarchical site structures are useful for websites that store a lot of data. Examples include eCommerce businesses and websites with thousands of products. Again, solid site structure is great at serving both human and search engine bot users because it’s smart, sound, and logical.

Provide users with a sitemap

This can help boost your User Experience and improve user engagement. At DreamHost, you can expect top-of-the-range speeds with built-in caching, available with all plans. However, with our Plus and Pro plans, you’ll also get access to a free Content Delivery Network to speed up page delivery across the globe. A website migration is any significant change to a website’s setup which may impact SEO, such as changes to the domain, URLs, hosting, platform, or design.

This can be ensured by adding a website that includes the most crucial content that is central to the structure and is of the highest quality. Thus, make sure the content you add on your website is high quality and informative. So, make sure your site crawlability is accurate as it will help you improve your site accurately and boost traffic. Roger Montti is a search marketer with over 20 years experience.

Site Structure and SEO

And users can only access a page that doesn’t appear in the search results by typing in the link directly. So pagination often works best for most sites for navigation purposes. But infinite scroll may work well for a blog or content that’s not product-based. But pagination gives users greater control and allows them to easily remember where products are located. Infinite scroll can decrease the number of clicks it takes for users to reach a product. Prototyping is an early sample of a design that allows users to visualize, test, and interact with the draft version of the product before it is finalized.

Google automatically pulls out the most relevant information to generate sitelinks, and the only way you can influence this process is to build a comprehensive structure. By linking several pieces of content that cover different aspects of the same topic, you can help search engines recognize your site as an industry expert. This authority can be hard to achieve if your pages are scattered randomly with no obvious relationship to one another. Categorization will help you choose the main keywords in each category, determine the page’s type, and create hierarchies—subcategories, subpages, or filters.