Site structure is basically the way content is grouped within a website.
Every site has a structure in it. This structure is quite vital when it comes to SEO and hence it should be well arranged and easy to navigate. The better the site structure, the better the performance in search engines.
Importance of Site Structure
1. Helps in Creation of Sitelinks
As pointed out in our previous lesson, sitelinks are additional links that appear below the main domain in Search Engine Result Pages.
These links help users easily navigate the website, pointing them to the most relevant details that would like to access, thereby leading to high click through rates.
2. Crawlability
Site structure helps search engines understand what your site content is about, as well as identifying the most valuable content within your website.
A good structured site makes it easier for crawlers to access and index this content.
3. Helps in avoiding competition with yourself
If for example you have in place posts or pages sharing the same topic, it’s quite difficult for search engines to identify which is the most important content. This creates a ranking competition within your site.
Structuring your content in order to inform Google of the most important content is hence vital.
How To Create a Good Site Structure
1. Plan the Hierarchy first
If you are starting a new site or rather developing a site from scratch, it is important to start by planning its structure first. This helps in ensuring everything is setup correctly and nothing is left out, as well as saving on time.
2. Setup a URL structure
It’s important to take into consideration your site URL when setting up the structure. The URL structure should be developed based on the hierarchy you planned.
If for example you had a hierarchy as illustrated above, the URL to the Europe region would be https://www.mycarspage.net/regions/europe
3. Create a navigation structure for your navigation bar
The header navigation bar should contain minimal menu links and only the most important of them.
It is also vital that if you also have a footer with a menu in place, ensure that the same menu is used within the footer.
4. Create an internal linking strategy
It is important to come up with a great internal linking structure, linking to only the most important content within your site.
Internal linking should also be implemented to a page level as it informs search engines on the important pages and how to get to them.
It is also important to reduce the number of clicks required to access certain content from the home page. If a user takes quite a number of clicks to for example access a subpage, this results in a negative user experience, which will in turn negatively impact SEO. It is recommendable to keep the number of clicks to a maximum of 3.
5. Creating a Sitemap
This will help search engines in understanding your website structure while crawling your site, as well as in determining the most important pages within it.