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Video Summary
Have you ever visited a website and found it confusing? You weren’t quite sure how to find what you were looking for? Maybe it didn’t have a standard menu, or it tried to do something strange?
Have you ever wanted to make a purchase, but you couldn’t even find the “Buy” button? An effective and organized site structure helps solve these problems.
Find out how easy is it to navigate your website and how to improve your website structure by following these tips.
Video Transcript
How easy is it to navigate your website? Can visitors to your site find what they need?
Website Structure
Site structure refers to the way you organize the elements in your website, so your users can navigate easily and find what they’re looking for.
Have you ever visited a website and found it confusing? You weren’t quite sure how to find what you were looking for? Maybe it didn’t have a standard menu, or it tried to do something strange?
Have you ever wanted to make a purchase, but you couldn’t even find the “Buy” button? An effective and organized site structure helps solve these problems.
Structure deals with the idea of how your pages and content are grouped into categories, linked together, and presented to your visitors. To put it simply, structure is a discussion of how your pages are connected to one another.
The more content you have, the more pages you have added into your website. And your website is a lot like your closets, your garage, your refrigerator, even your desk… As you add more stuff, they start to get messy.
And if you don’t fix this issue on your website, a lot of content will get lost, and visitors will not easily find what they’re looking for.
Imagine a teacher checking the exam papers of students from different classes. If she has no system of organization in place and all exams are in a single pile, then it becomes difficult to know which class any given paper belongs to. And it becomes difficult to find the paper of a particular student.
Perhaps it’s not much of a problem if there are only 2 or 3 classes with 5 students each. But consider if there are 4 classes, each with a hundred students. Now this lack of organization becomes a more serious problem.
Similarly, if you do not organize your website content and pages, your blog posts and other product pages will get lost in one big pile. Users will have a hard time finding what they need. And though search engines might still be able to index all of it, some of the relationship between pages can get lost.
And that’s a problem because your SEO strategy will begin to suffer without the context of a proper site structure.
Why is it important?
So, besides organization, why is site structure important?
There are 3 main reasons why you should take some time to enhance the structure of your website …
First, doing this provides a better user experience.
A well-organized website makes it easy for its users to navigate and find what they’re looking for. That should always be your main focus of your site. Creating a seamless experience for visitors benefits both you and them.
If they can easily find what they want without any frustrations and you get a sale, that’s a win-win!
Of course, unsatisfied users from a badly constructed website will leave, and that increases your bounce rate, which has a negative impact on your search ranking. And this leads me to the second point…
Good site structure influences your SEO.
With a well-organized structure, Google easily finds your content and better understands what your business is about. It can understand what your products and services are and how they fit various searches.
Search engines will more easily crawl your pages and determine which ones contain the most valuable content. These high-value pages are then matched more easily to search queries and, therefore, can help you rank higher in the search results.
And third, having a solid site structure can prevent you from competing with yourself.
What do I mean by this?
For example, as time goes on it’s not unusual to develop several blog posts about similar topics. Google doesn’t know which one is the most important to you. As a result, all of these related posts are competing against each other for placement in the search results for the same topic.
With proper internal linking and tagging, crawlers are able to understand the intent of each post and can rank each one properly relative to the others. Imagine if someone does a search and 3 of your blog posts end up on the first page. That’s making a statement isn’t it!?
Okay, now that you know the importance of site structure, here are some basic tips to help you start improving yours.
Tips to Improve your Website Structure
To begin, be sure to remove any irrelevant and outdated content from your website. Be careful you don’t create any dead links though. If you have links to any pages you remove, you’ll have to fix those.
And in case there are links out there on external pages or indexed by search engines, you should set up redirects so no one gets an error.
As for your most important pages, improve the internal linking by making sure that many other pages link to these important pages. And in most cases, you would want links between any related pages.
By doing these things, search engines can tell which pages are more important, which pages are related to each other, and which pages are your top priorities.
Then, provide a simple, easy-to-understand navigation for your visitors. It doesn’t matter if you have a menu of 5 single items or 7 top-level choices with drop-down menus holding several more for each. As long as the drop-down choices make sense relative to the top level, it’s easy to follow.
Also, if you allow navigation by categories, tags, or other attributes, make sure these are well-organized. It is considered a best practice to remove any duplicate and empty categories. So, check on these from time to time, and delete anything you don’t need.
Also, make sure your blog posts are aligned with the correct categories, and that your categories are a good fit for your business. Having categories that do not connect with your brand will create confusion and might hurt your reputation.
Finally, keep your URLs simple and easy to understand by using SEO-friendly permalinks and URL structures.
When set up properly, search engines can use permalinks as additional information to understand what your post is about. Of course, the more they understand, the more likely your pages are to rank higher in the search results.
Here’s an example of a good permalink and a bad one…
The first option contains the words “free alternative to zoom”. The second says question mark p equals 3200.
Option 1: https://www.upatdawn.biz/meetn-a-free-alternative-to-zoom
Option 2: https://www.upatdawn.biz/?p=3200
Which one do you think is more readable? Which one tells the search engines what the page is about. With option 1, you instantly know there’s a free alternative to zoom. Option 2 goes to the same page, but offers no information about the content.
Having a clean SEO-friendly URL is one of the factors that helps your website rank higher in the search results. And the best way to use this to your advantage is by incorporating your keywords directly into the URLs. If you want to know more about keywords and how to use them, I have a video explaining these in more detail.
Well, that’s it! Your website structure is an important factor for building your website. If you are creating a new website, plan the structure from the beginning. If you have an existing site, figure out what makes sense now, and make some changes.
An organized and effective site structure can help Google index your site and provide a better user experience. And both of these can lead to higher ranking in the search results!
Your business deserves to be found online and I will help you get there. Thanks for being here, and if you don’t mind, would you please subscribe to my channel?
Thanks much and have a great day!
