How to create a website structure?

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24 Feb, 2023

A Guide to Crafting an Effective Website Structure

Without a well-organized website structure, your website is like a jumbled collection of pages and blog posts, leaving users lost in the digital wilderness. A solid architecture is crucial for guiding users, enhancing their experience, and also for optimizing your site's search engine performance. In fact, a well-structured website significantly boosts your chances of securing a prominent spot on Google's first page. In this article, we'll explore the importance of website structure and provide tips and examples, brought to you by MMONET, to help you create a website structure that's optimized for both SEO and user satisfaction.

Understanding Website Structure

Website structure refers to the way content and pages are organized on your site and the links connecting them. Your website showcases a range of content, presented as articles or pages, and the structure defines how this content is grouped, interconnected, and presented to visitors. A well-planned structure benefits both users and search engines. Users can easily navigate, and Google can efficiently index your pages. There are various methods to structure a site, including hierarchy levels, categories, internal links, navigation menus, breadcrumb trails, sitemaps, and more.

The Significance of Website Architecture for SEO

Your website's architecture plays a pivotal role in terms of usability and visibility, impacting both user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, many websites lack a well-defined structure to guide visitors and assist search engines in understanding their content. A clear and functional site architecture is essential for successful SEO. However, it often receives less attention compared to other aspects like website design. This underscores the importance of website architecture for SEO, emphasizing the need to invest time in building a strong site structure.

Enhancing User Experience (UX)

As followers of Google's SEO guidelines are aware, UX is a ranking factor, giving rise to the term "SXO," which combines UX and SEO. Google employs various criteria to assess a website's UX quality, including loading speed, interactivity, and stability, as highlighted in Core Web Vitals. Although not the primary factor, UX significantly influences visibility and user engagement. A well-structured site keeps visitors exploring for longer, increasing the likelihood of retention or conversion. To achieve this, visitors must easily locate important elements and navigate logically from one page to another.

Providing Guidance to Crawlers

Crawlers, or indexing robots, are responsible for exploring the vast expanses of the web. Google's bots use links to navigate websites and determine the relationships between pages and their hierarchy. Your site's structure serves as a guide for Google, helping it understand where to find essential content, grasp your site's purpose, and index and rank pages accordingly. A robust website architecture ensures that Google can locate your most crucial content, contributing to effective indexing and positioning of your pages for relevant queries.

Minimizing SEO Cannibalization Risks

Within the same website, it's common to cover similar or identical topics. For instance, your SEO blog may include articles on natural SEO, paid SEO, and other closely related subjects. Elements of your site's architecture, such as the taxonomy system (categories and tags), internal links, and navigation, help signal to Google which content is most significant and should rank for specific keywords. This prevents multiple pages from competing against each other and ensures control over which page is considered the primary one.

Securing Sitelinks on the SERP

Sitelinks, additional links displayed under a company's main URL in search results, offer users more choices and streamline navigation. These links provide quick access to specific pages, enhancing visibility and click-through rates. A solid site structure is essential for earning sitelinks, which deliver several SEO advantages:

Accelerated access to the right page or information, streamlining the conversion process and increasing the chances of successful conversions.
Improved visibility on search engines, enhancing brand reputation.
Enhanced user trust and a higher click-through rate.

Sitelinks prove particularly beneficial but are only attainable with a well-structured site, encompassing link anchors, sitemaps, breadcrumb trails, and table of contents. Google's algorithms automatically assign these complementary links based on your site's structure. A shaky structure could prevent your site from receiving these links, resulting in missed opportunities for targeted traffic, higher CTR, and conversions.

When to Revise Your Site Architecture

The best time to refine your site's structure is before you begin designing it. This approach is crucial when planning to add pages and articles, as creating content without a clear structure is akin to blindly speeding into a wall. Instead, start by outlining your site on a blank page or spreadsheet to shape your design concept. This strategic step is essential for both website and blog creation, as well as site redesign or mergers. Always remember that natural SEO should be an integral part of the process before, during, and after the graphic and aesthetic design phase!

Choosing Website Tree Software

Various software options are available to help you structure and organize your website. These tools allow you to visualize, validate, and refine your ideas, ultimately improving your site's hierarchy. Depending on your needs, you can gain a clear picture of your site tree and refine your vision. One such tool is MindMeister, a comprehensive mind mapping application for web project presentation and design. It's user-friendly and offers a free basic version, enabling you to visualize your site hierarchy, add comments, note targeted keywords, track writing progress, and more.

Here are other mapping tools that may suit your site tree creation needs:

Creately.com
FlowMapp: A tool for designing individual pages and optimizing UX.
MindNode
Slickplan: Ideal for creating site plans, improving UX, planning content creation, and graphic design.
Dynomapper: A software for creating interactive site trees.

Creating the Perfect Site Hierarchy

Now that you grasp the importance, let's explore how to construct the ideal site hierarchy. Generally, a robust hierarchy encompasses a homepage, categories, subcategories, and individual pages or articles, often depicted as a pyramid with the homepage at the apex.

1. Design a Hierarchy in Advance

Before diving into site redesign or creation, envision and design an optimal hierarchy. This involves organizing information and pages logically and simply for users and search engines. The hierarchical relationships between pages influence linking, navigation elements, and URL structure. Here's a breakdown:

Compile a list of all current and future pages in an Excel spreadsheet.
Add essential information for each page, including main keywords, titles, meta descriptions, and H1 headings.
Create your hierarchy by grouping pages and establishing categories and subcategories.

Be Logical

Less is more! Complex structures and navigation paths frustrate users and search engines. Prioritize user comfort and navigation ease. Ensure categories have distinct, evocative titles, while subcategories should complement their parent category.

Limit Categories

Divide your site's content into several categories, and if needed, subdivide them into subcategories for clarity and specificity. For instance, an e-commerce hat shop might have categories like Hats, Caps, Berets, and Beanies. Caps can further break down into Snapback Caps, Trucker Caps, Flat Caps, and Gavroche Caps to prevent cluttering the main menu.

Unless you're managing an exceptionally vast site, aim for no more than 6 or 7 categories in the main menu. Main categories should represent major themes.

Balance Categories and Subcategories

Strive to maintain a similar number of subcategories across all main categories. Having one main category with 20 subcategories while another has only 2 can create an imbalance. Plan your website structure carefully for the next 2 or 3 years to ensure optimal structure retention as you create more pages.

2. Craft an SEO-Friendly URL Structure

Your site's URL structure impacts its Google rankings. Clear, readable URLs enhance visibility and attract quality traffic. URL structure aligns closely with your site's hierarchy, revealing its levels. For example, www.mysite.com/hat/snapback/nba/chicago-bulls-hat instantly communicates that this page belongs to the Hat category, under Snapback, and in the sub-subcategory of NBA.

In an SEO-optimized site structure, URLs should follow this hierarchy naturally, reflecting the page's location on the site. Complex sites may feature longer paths with numerous folders and subfolders, but aim for concise URLs with recognizable words. Strive to maintain a short, understandable structure that incorporates your target keywords.

3. Code with Simplicity

Effective website architecture ensures navigation is accessible to all users, including crawlers. Code using the web's most universal and straightforward languages, HTML and CSS. Avoid JavaScript, Flash, and AJAX, as they can limit site accessibility and navigation.

4. Avoid Burying Pages

In web design, page depth refers to the number of clicks required to reach a page from the homepage, including menu, content, or footer clicks. Page depth is crucial, as Google values pages accessible in one click from the homepage more than those requiring multiple clicks. A page that's hard to access in several clicks tends to perform poorly.

In summary, websites with less depth, typically requiring three clicks or fewer to reach each page, are preferable. Ensure that essential pages are not buried deep within the site's structure. If that's unavoidable, find alternative methods to link to these pages.

5. Incorporate Navigation Elements

Various navigation elements enhance both UX and SEO by making your site's tree more dynamic and functional. Here are some essential elements:

The Main Navigation Menu

The primary menu is the most vital navigation element, whether you're focusing on UX or SEO. Visitors rely on your menu to find the right information and pages on your site. It also aids in comprehending your site's structure. For most sites, all main categories should appear in the primary menu on the homepage. Each site necessitates a thoughtful analysis to determine the most suitable menu, considering factors like the number of pages, site goals, type, and target audience. Menu options include navigation menus with dropdowns, double-bar menus, "burger" menus, mega menus, and more. The choice depends on the user's expectations.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a web navigation element usually located at the page's top, indicating the current page and the path to the homepage. Each step of the path is a clickable link. Breadcrumbs enhance SEO, user experience, and page visits per session. However, to maximize their effectiveness, a logical website tree is essential.

Blog Categories

If your site involves regularly adding new pages, a structured approach to categorizing your articles is essential. Categories help classify articles progressively based on the topics they cover. For instance, you can categorize blog posts into SEO, SEA, content marketing, website creation, web analytics, and more. This not only aids in organizing your content but also enables the creation of / blog/subcategory pages for better positioning.

6. Implement Internal Linking

Internal linking complements classification links (such as menus and taxonomies) and functions as the ligaments and veins of your site's structure. These contextual links, found within page content, direct users to other site pages. Ideally, the most important pages should receive the highest number of internal links, as Google assigns greater importance to pages with more internal links. Ensure that this is the case and make adjustments if needed.

Weight Strategic Pages

Contextual links refer to internal links within a page's content that guide visitors to other pages on the same site. These links should connect to pages relevant to the current page, enhancing the user experience. Google tends to prioritize pages with many internal links, considering them more important than pages with fewer links.

Tip: To identify the pages on your site with the most internal links, follow these steps:

Access Google Search Console.
Click on "LINKS."
Examine the "INTERNAL LINKS" section.

Contextualize Links

Google relies on anchor text and the context of your links to understand the linked page's topic. Anchor text isn't the sole factor Google considers; it also evaluates the surrounding words and paragraphs to grasp the link's meaning and gather additional information. Strategically place links in the most appropriate location within content, rather than listing multiple links in a bullet list at the page's end. Google better comprehends words and associated concepts this way, allowing for more precise analysis.

Conclusion

Prior to aiming for top positions in targeted keywords, it's crucial to design a clear website structure that enables users to navigate logically and efficiently between pages. This preparatory work, whether for a website redesign or creation, is essential, and the guidance of SEO experts can be invaluable.

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