Why is Site Structure so Important for your website’s SEO

Creating the perfect site structure or site architecture is so important because it improves SEO tremendously. Good website architecture is a secret to a long-running and successful campaign. If you want to rank better than your competitors, the following points explain why and how to structure your website for SEO.

Let us first know what Site Structure means?

Site structure refers to the way your website’s information is organized. A website consists of a variety of topics posted on different pages and blog posts. Site structure includes how your website’s content is grouped, linked, and presented to the viewer. If your website is well structured, it will benefit from this; users will be able to find their way more efficiently, and it would help Google index your URLs better. Taxonomies, like categories and tags, internal links, navigation, and breadcrumbs, are the tools to structure your site.

How does a Good SEO Site Structure help your website?

Now that we know about website architecture, and before we get to know the techniques, let us first understand why you must optimize your website structure for SEO advantage. For Google to rank your website or page better, your website should have a good user experience.

Now, what is user-friendly? Your website should have data that is properly organized and not cluttered. It should be easily readable by the visitor and easily crawlable and understandable by web Crawlers and Spiders. Also, this enhances the conversion funnel of a customer.

You must have a proper site architecture when you are trying to optimize your site for search engines. A proper site architecture will maximize the amount of time it takes for your site to be listed in a search engine. For your site to be ranked highly, you need to follow the rules that each search engine has set forth for ranking websites. Each search engine will list sites in different categories. For example, Google will rank your site according to the keyword or phrase that is most relevant to what your page is about.

Now let's see techniques for an SEO friendly Site Structure.

Here are a few best practices for your site architecture, and these will help you improve your user experience. This will also help you with your site structure issues if you have an existing site or build a website from scratch; this will guide you in creating the best site architecture.

Plan and Make a Site Structure Blueprint

As you cannot start constructing a house without preparing its blueprint, you cannot make a website without making a plan beforehand.

You can use a pen and paper, or you can use other applications to make SILO structure. Silo structure is just an organized and logical grouping and flow of information on your website.

Decide if you want to go for a flat site structure or deep site structure SEO strategy.
A flat site structure lets the user reach the target page with very few clicks, whereas a deep site structure has long paths to reach desired pages.

Flat Site Structure

Deep Site Structure

Identify your goals

Your website’s structure should reflect what you want your visitors to do and where you want your users and search engine to reach, and the best way to improve your user experience is –

Identify your stakeholders and target audience – First, you need to be aware of your audience. This will help you understand them and formulate strategies suited specifically for them.
Identify the goals – Once you’ve identified your audience, decide what you want them to do or what do you expect from them. It may be purchasing your product, availing of your services, or signing up for something.
Identify how you would achieve these goals – Know what landing page you want to take your users to and make proper site categories and other category pages.

URL structure should be SEO Friendly

Use lower case words in the URL.
Try to keep your URLs short.
Try including the main keyword for your page in the URL and make it appealing for the visitors.

Properly optimized URLs also help gain user trust and increase ctr as people usually judge the website by its URL.

Establishing Header and Footer

The header is another important aspect that helps you enhance your website.

You need to include your main categories and product pages in the header as it is a navigation menu that helps users and points users to the desired page. For example, putting home page, contact us, services/product, about us, etc., in header and footer and creating flow-through drop down menus that include other main site categories or category pages, blog post, etc.

Make sure you also put the content of your header into your footer. This will let the user navigate from no matter where they are on the website and reduce the bounce rate.

Featured Snippets

An essential SEO technique is to keep your pages well organized by using featured snippets at each page’s end. Google and other search engines use featured snippets to extract meaningful information from your website. For example, the Google feature page allows a user to click on a highlighted area of a page to be taken to a page with more information. This is a great way to categorize your pages. One more important thing to keep in mind is to include the most relevant content in your pages. When people google for something, your site content should be relevant and make sense to users to be at the top of the list.

Well-Designed Site Hierarchy

Another technique is to have a well-designed site hierarchy. This can be done by using internal linking, such as using keywords as anchor text within your main header tags or using a feature page to showcase all of your important pages. You can also include a short description within your main header tag or a feature page. Remember, every page must be relevant to the search engines to rank in search results.

Internal Linking

The best website architecture for SEO focuses on internal links. It is the whole process of linking one page to another. It’s done through descriptive anchor text within links. This includes the use of keywords, sub-domains, and website titles.

The proper internal linking process will lead to a smooth flow of traffic from one page to another, making the user experience better and will increase your site traffic.

This will also help drive traffic from the home page to your main categories and from main categories to any category page content.

Sitemap In Footer

Another great SEO strategy for site architecture is to make sure you include XML Sitemaps in your site footer. This will help the search engine crawlers to easily know your website architecture.

Efficient Site navigation

Here pages on your site are connected. It is the flow in which the user can navigate to and from one page to another.

A complete SEO solution will consist of content, keywords, Meta tags, URL structure, incoming links, site maps, and more.

Bonus Point - Content Optimization

Although this isn’t a part of the site structure, this is one of the best practices to improve your ranking.

If you already have an established website and it looks like it will not rank better on the existing content, you should remove the old content and put new content in it. Don’t forget to include keywords in your new content.

Conclusion

Many SEO companies promise to provide you with a complete site architecture for SEO.

However, many times, they fall short of their promises. Complete site architecture should consist of proper keyword research and analysis, keyword placement on web pages, and RSS feeds.

These aspects play an important role in the process of optimization and play a large factor in how well you rank within Google and other major search engines.

Your SEO Company must work closely with you to develop a complete strategy for your business, including all of the above factors.

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