What is SEO Friendly Website Structure & Why is it Important?

Website structure is the way to organize and deliver content on your website to help the users to quickly and easily find the information.

79% of people who don’t like what they find on the first site, will go search for another site.

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Website structure means planning and designing of the technical, functional, and visual components of a website, which means all the website’s pages that include homepage, categories, and subcategories are interlinked together in a structured way.

Related: SEO Features You Must Have on Your New Website

Why SEO Friendly Website Structure Important

When you talk about Search Engine Optimization, website structure is basic and the most important thing, you can’t ignore the structure of your site as it determines the engagement on your site.

The structure of your site has a significant impact on the experience of your visitors. If visitors can’t find the products and information they’re looking for, it’s not very likely they’ll become regular visitors or customers.

In other words, you should help them navigate your site. Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to instantly grasp what you’re writing about or selling.

Website architecture optimized for SEO is attractive and efficient for bots to crawl. This helps them find and display your content in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Related: 20 Reasons Why It’s Time to Make Your Website Responsive and Mobile-Ready

Good Website Structure Helps Google to Find Important Pages

The structure of your site plays a vital role in your SEO strategy. It is the site structure that helps Google to determine which pages of your site are most important.

It helps search engines understand what your site mainly is about or what you’re selling. Adding your top-performing pages at the beginning of the website structure hierarchy helps google to recognize the importance of it.

Website Structure is Important for Getting Sitelinks

Sitelinks are shown on the Google result page when someone searches for the website with its brand name. They are usually shown below the main URL (Domain Name) with the other important page links in a well-structured way.

Here you can see how they look like.

The purpose of sitelinks is to make navigation easy for the users.
For instance, if the user searches for incrementors then it might be he isn’t interested to visit the homepage of it, instead, he wanted to visit the blog page of incrementors.

So the main goal of sitelinks is to give the quick and best experience to navigate website directly to search results page rather than inside the website, from the webmaster perspective it helps in building the brand image of your site that is an important ranking factor.

Helps Search Engine Crawlers to Navigate Your Site Easily

It is very essential to have a defined structure of your site, without it your site will be just merely a collection of pages and blogs.

A good website structure enables users and search engine crawlers to move through your site easily. It helps users know “What to do?” and “Where to go next?”

If you create a good site structure then chances of getting indexed quickly in the Google database will increase and with that chances of ranking for the target keyword will also increase.

Because the main goal of Google crawlers is to understand and index content to provide accurate results for the given query.

Types of Website Structure

Hierarchical Model

The hierarchical model is the most common type of site architecture. This is mostly used by websites that have a large number of pages.

Sequential Model

Sequential models are popular when leading users through a sequence like a step-by-step process.

This allows users to navigate a website in a sequence manner means they can easily go back and forth between menu.

Matrix Model

The matrix model is one of the oldest site structure types on the internet.

This gives users options to choose where they want to go next with all the internal links on the same page. Wikipedia is a great example of the matrix model.

Database Model

A database model is an effective approach to the website structure. To build a website structure like this, designers should think about the bottom-up approach by considering a page’s metadata such as category, tags, creator name, and folder.

Website Structure Tools

PowerMapper

You can use this tool to know about the structure of your website and others website so that you can customize your website as per your need. It builds a visual sitemap of website structure automatically.

FlowMapp

You can use FlowMapp tool to create the visualized version of your website as per the data of customer behavior to give the best user experience and this tool is free for beginner light users

Slickplan

Whether you’re planning a new website or just redesigning a current one, It should be user-friendly, super organized, and look great. By using this tool you can pre-planning your website structure.

Benefits of a Good Website Structure

• A clear structure helps a website to rank higher, especially if the website is big with several levels of page hierarchy. For example, e-commerce websites or business catalogs.

• A well-planned structure reduces the chance of duplicated pages and duplicated content.

• SEO works better when the keywords are properly distributed throughout the website pages when different groups of keywords with different intents are put on relevant landing pages. This is what a well-planned structure provides.

• If Google lands a user on a wrong page of a well-structured website, the user can easily find the needed page anyway.

• The structure serves a great user experience, boosting a website’s behavioral signals.

• It increases the conversion rate, if users find relevant content easily on a website, then it adds to a positive user experience and happy users are the ones who become returning customers.

Steps For Creating Great Website Structure

Google’s goal is to give the best experience and results to the user, that is why they give top priorities to fast loading websites with mobile-first indexing in the same way site structure is important from the perspective of user and Google

Website structure is all about navigation, if you succeed in creating a user-friendly structure that meets the demand of search crawlers and users then definitely it’ll help in increased dwell time on your website.

Create a Clear Hierarchy and Develop Your Website

Plan your hierarchy from an SEO perspective, before you create a webpage plan out a proper structure for it. You can do it on a whiteboard, spreadsheet, or word processor. Deciding hierarchy helps you to organize information in a simple way.

Do not overcomplicate the process of creating a hierarchy. Each main category should be distinct and the sub-category should be related to the main category, under which it is placed.

Site navigation decides how long a visitor stays on your site. If they reach the desired location or get the answer to the search in a few simple clicks, you’ve built successful site navigation.

If the visitor can’t reach the result in less than three clicks, your site structure is not perfect. You have lost your visitors and they may never return. This should not happen.

Create URL Structure That Follows Navigation Hierarchy

Google always prefers simple URLs. If you create your hierarchy logically, then it helps search engines and users to understand the page, and easy to read URL also plays a role in passing link equity.

Keep these points in mind while creating URL

• Use lowercase words with alphanumeric characters.
• Join words with hyphens.
• Keep URLs short having 128 characters or less is a good rule of thumb.
• Make URL names appealing to humans, use descriptive keywords, and include your main search query for the page.
• Use logical folders for categories and subcategories of content.
• Avoid using session IDs in URLs.

Develop a Comprehensive Internal Linking Structure

Internal links connect one page of the website to another page of your website. Websites with more than one page follow the interlinking structure. Interlinking is the most important part of a great user experience.

Interlinks are important because users can easily navigate your site. A proper information hierarchy for websites is established.

Interlinking should not be made complicated, every page on the website should have a link to another page on the website. Along with creating internal links to main category and subcategory pages.

Your most important pages are probably often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site, so you’ll link to them most often.

Just remember that not only the page you’re linking to is relevant, the context and the anchor text also plays a major role.

Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you’re linking to. It always used the anchor text (or link text) to understand what the page you’re linking to is about.

A well-designed site structure comes out of clear thinking and perfect organization. Plan your website structure before creating a website. If you are redesigning a website, you can rework on the design aspect and also reorganize some navigational elements.

Don’t make your page overcrowded with unnecessary links, use reasonable and a limited number of links. Too many links on your webpage will make your user confuse and distract from your site.

Related: Link Building Guide For Beginners

Create Your Site Navigation in HTML or CSS

Easy navigation is the key element of any website. A navigation bar should be created in HTML or CSS.

CSS helps transform boring HTML menus into good-looking navigation bars. A navigation bar contains a list of links to help visitors navigating through your website.

Coding should always be simple, CSS and HTML are the safest and preferred ones.

Coding in Flash, JavaScript, and Ajax, it may limit the crawler’s ability to cover the website’s navigation and hierarchy.

Related: 20 Reasons Why It’s Time to Make Your Website Responsive and Mobile-Ready

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Conclusion

A good website structure is a result of an intelligent pre-planned strategy that brings positive results for you and to the user, It is best that you plan out your website structure before launching your website.

In the present time when user experience became a top priority for Google. Webmasters can’t afford to overlook this important part of effective SEO.