Starting a blog/website nowadays is not a difficult task but increasing its visibility and improving rank is the huge task we face afterward. This is the biggest challenge for bloggers, small businesses, and personal website owners.
Websites with loading time more than 3 sec results in higher bouncing rate and that’s where website structure comes in the role.
As we know a well-structured city enables its residents to roam around in a strategic manner helping them find their way, such is the case with the website.
A website is made of various pages and posts and it needs to be categorized in an excellent website structure which will enable the users to navigate through all the content easily.
So, let’s now understand what is website structure and why it is important for websites.
What website structure really is…
Website structure refers to the way a website is set up i.e. how the homepage, category and tags pages and other important pages are interconnected.
Ideal site structure of any site should resemble a pyramid with homepage at the top and categories with subcategories beneath it.
User’s attention span is very short in this fast-paced internet so your site structure should mainly focus on providing a great experience to your users and to enable search engines crawlers to properly crawl your website for faster indexing (to rank in search engines such as Google).
You need to think about your target audience while deciding your site structure.
The unstructured website will lead to higher bounce rate resulting in lower visibility of your site. While better site structures result in higher ranking in search engines as for how a site is structured is an important ranking signal for Google.
Google algorithm takes information from users to rank any site.
So, if a user dwells on any website for the longest time which happens due to good site structure, it results in lowering of bounce rate eventually improving the rank of the site.
How poor website structure affects business?
Many reports including studies done by Backlinko, Neil Patel showed that even an increase of a second in page load time can result in higher bounce rate and decreased revenue.
And 100ms increase in load time is almost equal to 11% decreased traffic and 6% reduction in sales.
Also, for most of the websites, search engines drive most of their traffic so if search engines crawlers are having a difficult time in understanding what your site is all about, then your site will get low ranks and hence less traffic.
And as you know, less traffic means less leads or sales and ultimately less revenue.
Importance of Website Structure
- It is a crucial aspect of Site’s SEO performance but still the most underlooked phenomenon. A good site structure enhances user experience. If a site is appealing to users, then it’s appealing to search engines too.
- When a website’s homepage is linked to every important subpage, it makes easy for crawlers to crawl your site. Crawlers go through each page easily due to which every category and subcategory can be visible to the user.
- If users can navigate easily through your site, can find the information or products they are looking for without hassles, the chances of them becoming your customer is highly increased.
- Good structure of the website is necessary to get sitelinks from google. Sitelinks are not something you can download from google webmaster tool, It is rewarded by Google for easy usability.
The easy tip to create a site for best user experience, getting crawled and indexing by the spider and the high ranking is to categorize your site in various subcategories linked to each other.
How to design a good structure for your website?
Designing a good site structure seems easy and it is easy for small sites or blogs but for medium and large sites, maintaining a good site structure can be a very big problem sometimes.
Even if you have a small site but if you have plans to expand your site in future, having a good structure can help you a lot in the long run.
So, let’s understand some of the ways of creating a site structure.
1. Plan before creating
If you are just starting out and if you haven’t started your site yet then it is the best time for you to plan your site structure now.
Before you start creating any pages or categories, plan your structure first. Use pen paper or excel sheet or anything with which you are comfortable to do the same.
Some points which you should follow while creating a site structure are:
- Use logic while creating the structure and not just your gut feeling. Sub categories should be related to the main category and main categories should be related to the overall theme of your website.
- Try to keep the main category between two to seven unless you are having a very big site to manage.
- Use only those subcategories which are closely related to the main category as non-related subcategory can make the structure a little unbalanced.
- Give proper names to your categories and subcategories having all the relevant keywords.
2) Good URL structure
A good URL structure aligned with your overall site structure is important as URLs have a very important value in SEO (search engine optimization).
Keep the URL structure simple with simple and easy to understand words while avoiding unnecessary symbols or numbers in the URL. And try to keep the URLs keyword rich so that it can benefit you in the long run.
Tip: Make sure that your site navigation is properly visible on the mobile version of your site also as Google is focusing more on mobile sites and site structure must be clearly visible on the mobile version of your site.
Conclusion
A good website structured is necessary for higher rankings and increased traffic. It helps both your readers and search engines to navigate your site easily.
It needs to plan before setup of website but if you don’t have it structured before, you can now redesign your website totally for the higher boost of SEO.
And don’t ignore this as site structure is the base of any website and is one of the most important SEO factors.
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