Website Structure Definition & Explanation

On the other hand, it could be a useful feature that will help improve user flow across your site. Designers, content managers, and web developers come together to build a site architecture and user experience that serves a target audience. This can be difficult without the right tools, which is why we created the Website Structure Diagram for easy visual mapping. Site architecture is a foundational principle oftechnical search engine optimization.

Pagespeed is a confirmed Google ranking factor on desktop and mobile. Learn how to speed up your WordPress website in 11 simple steps. There are more things to consider for bigger websites, though. The importance, impact, and complexity of website structure grow with the size of your website. You should be ready to tackle this problem for any small-to-medium-sized website now. Generally speaking, they’re not necessary if you have a relatively small website with a flat structure.

Guide to build a solid structure

The hierarchical structure, aka the tree model, takes a top-down approach to guide visitors from a general page, like a homepage, to more content. General pages are also called top pages, while pages with specific content are subpages or child pages. Website structure refers to the organizational design of a website’s pages. Creating a website structure involves organizing and classifying content to create a layout that’s understandable, accessible, and predictable. Navigation should be intuitive so users can find what they’re looking for on any page without much effort. Yoast SEO has some handy tools to make internal linking so much easier.

When crawling via Netpeak Spider, you can analyze the structure of your website, your competitors, getting a convenient report. The structure of the website is the correlation between all its pages and the clear hierarchy. Let’s assume that we have to collect keywords for a bathrobe online store. You can easily visualize the website structure in the XMind tool.

Website Structure Requirements

Below that, they could have NBA, NFL, and NHL, and then below that, individual match reports, for example. These are the subheadings in each chapter, and they are focused on a single item or idea. This might be an individual article or a product page in an e-commerce site.

If you’ve earned backlinks from reputable websites, you want to make the most of the authority and link equitythose endorsements lend. Aninternal linkingstructure passes that authority through a chain of related pages on your website. Without that structure in place, it’ll be more difficult to distribute the benefits of your backlinking efforts. It’s important that your navigation menu design is simple and intuitive to help users find what they’re looking for. With this in mind, you can make your top-level items accessible from every web page.

A step by step guide for Lean UX Design

In addition, when it comes to written content, try to make your categories roughly the same size. If one gets too large, consider whether it makes sense to divide it into two. These consist of pillar pages that cover the main topics and information of your site in a relatively broad but detailed way. They have supporting content pieces clustered around them that dive into more specific information and link back to the pillar. Great examples of hierarchical website structure are news sites that divide their homepage by categories, which lead down to individual posts and pages.

• If you’ve earned backlinks from reputable websites, you want to make the most of the authority and link equitythose endorsements lend.
• In this structure, web pages of a website are linked using different multiple structures.
• And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere.
• And if you link to a particular page many times, Google will see that you think it’s important.
• However, with our Plus and Pro plans, you’ll also get access to a free Content Delivery Network to speed up page delivery across the globe.

Breadcrumb trails like the one used by Mailchimp improve usability and user experience. The depth of your architecture also affects how search engines crawl your site. So the lower the crawl depth, the quicker and more likely search engines can navigate to a webpage. A well-planned structure is what turns a messy set of webpages into a site loved by users and search engines. For both, it’s crucial to get a clear idea of how your website is organized and how to find relevant information on it.

I hope you are getting a lot of value out of this blog post.

Their articles are greatly interlinked, so you can jump from topic to topic with reckless abandon. The user experience is very dependent on your preference and choices. It’s great for websites that offer a free-flow approach, such as microsites or content hubs. In short, site structure makes your site easy for users and search https://globalcloudteam.com/ engines to navigate, which is good for increasing traffic and revenue thanks to strong UX and SEO. This model makes your internal linking structure clearer and effectively directs users to other pieces of relevant and useful content. Plus, when your user experience is strong, your search engine rankings will be, too.

Optimizing your internal PageRank and validating your structure ideas with your target audience via user testing. I’ll only bring up two more important components, and the first is breadcrumbs navigation. Top-level navigation is essential for visitors to be able to switch between your most important pages conveniently. Those pages represent the highest level in your website structure. You can decide if and how to expand on your top-level pages based on your knowledge of the industry, common sense, and the keyword research.

Ways for Creating a Website Structure That’s Optimized for SEO

Making your site easier to navigate, don’t forget about search crawlers. Sitemaps help them keep track of all pages that appear on your website and index them faster. Search engines can also use the sitemap as a reference when determining canonical URLs. If your website has a lot of services or products to offer, you should design a system of filters and sorting options to help users find what they are looking for. The filters can differ depending on the category and should cover all possible product characteristics. Also, you can check which particular pages of your competitors show the greatest results in search, what’s their place in the how to plan a website structure, and what keywords they use.