Why Better Website Structure is
Important to Better Ranking
Technical SEO must form a major part of any SEO strategy you deploy for your business. The website structure is a core component of Technical SEO. Every website has a structure of some sort, good or bad. The better the structure is, the better the chances that it will contribute to improving the ranking of your website, and consequently your online visibility.
What is Site Structure?
Site structure is a key but often neglected method of optimizing your website. It refers to how your website content is organized. It is different from website design which is more about the outlook of the pages. Site structure is about how the content of a site is categorized, linked together and presented to all page visitors. It requires careful consideration and intentional design to prevent it from becoming a jigsaw puzzle of pages into a beautifully well-organized site that depicts excellence.
A good site structure will
- Improve the user experience by making navigation easy.
- Provide your site with site links
- Allow crawlers to properly access your site pages
The visual presentation of your site structure is the site map which ideally should be pyramidal in shape.
Why a Better Website Structure will Improve Your Ranking
The three purposes served by a good site structure are also the three reasons why a better site structure will help improve your ranking
Better User Experience
The better the impression of your page visitors about your page (easily characterized by the time they spend on it), the more appealing the page will be to search engines too. A higher click-through rate, dwell time and a shorter bounce rate will both lead to better site ranking.
Provides Sitelinks
A site link is a listing format in the SERP which shows your home page along with other internal links. They are automatically generated by Google algorithms and only sites with great structures receive them. Site links make navigation easier, increase click-through rate and improve your brand awareness.
Better Crawling
Search engine crawlers crawl your entire site content to index them and make them available as search results when matching search parameters are inputted. It includes navigating the whole website to determine what the site is about and how relevant its content is to what it claims to be about. Sites that have a better structure will be easily crawled, indexed and returned. This will make your website more visible and discoverable.
Improving your Existing Structure
However, it is, your website structure can be improved by simply doing the following
- Remove duplicate pages: Pages with the same content are considered as spam and often not indexed. Thus, instead of having similar content on different pages, it is better to focus effort on creating one quality content that search engines cannot ignore.
- Structure URL properly: An average of 36-38 characters should be aimed for in your URL as these can be easily crawled. Also, avoid special characters in your URL as they can also make it difficult for crawlers to crawl your website.
- Optimize categories: Avoid focusing on one category to the detriment of others. Having a category that is twice as large as another category is not good for example. Where this has happened, you can choose to either merge or split categories further
Conclusion
There is no ideal structure for your website. However, the structure you use should be closely related to the kind of content that will be displayed on your pages. Improving your website structure will indirectly help increase the ranking of your website, making sure that your SEO endeavors continue to reflect. Using My Site Auditor can help you set up and make your site structure better. You can simply click here to begin.
