Website Structure and SEO
Website structure dictates how your website will be crawled by Google, how important each page is, and how each page is rated based on its importance. Every website starts from the home page and flows down to other pages. How easily accessible your sub-pages are from your home page or the main page dictates the importance of your pages.
There are four types of site structures used, but they extend in terms of complexity in each model. To begin with, let’s understand the site structures in their simplest forms:
- Hierarchical: Most websites have a hierarchical system. The home page links to sub-pages, and sub-pages link to sub-sub-pages, and so on. The most important page is the home page, with the sub-page having the second highest priority, and lower priority as the level goes down.
- Linear Sequential Structure: Linear hierarchy links one page to the next, and the next page links to the next. This is a series of pages linked in a linear form. The links are not intertwined. Each page has one link to the next page and the previous page, except for the home page and the last page in the series. Think of this as a train with the engine being the first and the wagons as each page.
- Matrix: The matrix structure links all the sub-pages from the main page, while the sub-pages are in a linear format. This is a combination of sequential and linear structures in many ways but is slightly more complex.
- Database Structure: Prominent and widely used, the database structure is a dynamic structure that relies on search functionality and user-defined paths to set a predefined sequence. When it comes to SEO, the database site structure is more sensible, with pages linking to relevant pages based on the content of the existing page and the page linked to. The database structure is best suited for large websites with over 100 pages or even thousands of pages with a complex structure.
Website Structure and Complexity
For small sites, one of the first three structures is well-suited. The database structure is not required and may be overkill for smaller websites. With 100 pages, you could easily create a website structure using one of the first three or combining them to create multiple spoke-wheel structures linked to each other based on relevance. Website structure only gets more complex as the number of pages increases, and keeping an organized structure not only helps with search engines but also enhances user experience.
Tips to Create a Website Structure
No matter what your website is about or which industry you work in, a website structure should be scalable and adaptable to the needs of the future. This requires planning, keeping in mind that your website will grow rapidly. More often than not, your website tends to grow faster than your business itself. With a very active website, chances are you will be looking at over 100 pages in a few months, if not weeks. Planning your website structure will keep your website optimized for search engines and provide a great user experience. With this in mind, start your website structure first and keep the following points in mind:
- Start with a Clear Hierarchy: Start small but be very clear about the hierarchy. While a linear structure may be a good option for some websites, hierarchical structures are more scalable. Plan to have a mix of both linear and hierarchical structures with a spoke-wheel in mind, intertwined with each other and linked from the main page. The first phase of your structure should have a silo structure with the home page on top, less than 10 sub-pages, and up to 4-5 sub-sub-pages under each sub-page.
- Prioritize Internal Linking: One of the biggest mistakes people make while creating their website is ignoring internal links. Navigation links are limited to a certain section of the web page. You may have a few links on the top header of the web page and some on the footer. With websites that are large, with over 1,000 pages, you cannot fit all your links into these two sections. Internal links are crucial to ensure a good user experience. Link from “RELEVANT PAGES WITH RELEVANT ANCHOR TEXT TO RELATED PAGES.” All three entities should be followed. You should link from a relevant page that talks about the same topic as the page you are linking to, and the anchor text should have a related keyword as anchor text. Do not link from a page about manufacturing toys to a page about medicine with an anchor text that says “Click Here.” It does not make sense why a page about toys would link to a page about medicine with a link text that says “Click Here.” It would make a lot of sense for us as humans if the context is provided, but for a search engine, this may be an absurd connection.
When it comes to what to do, link relevant pages from the content. It does not matter how many pages you link to, as long as it is reasonable and provides more information to the users, link it. - Focus on Core Pages: Core pages are the most important pages of your website. These are often called the pillar pages, which link to multiple detail pages and are linked from the detail pages too. The pillar pages constitute the most amount of content and traffic to the website apart from the home page. Create more content that links to the core pages to increase the importance of the pillar pages. A spoke-wheel structure is often common when linking pillar pages to the sub-pages. Pillar pages can be linked to other pillar pages if they are relevant.
- Limit Depth of Clicks: You should be able to access any page of the website within three clicks. That’s not possible with a page that has over 1,000 pages. But you should focus on being able to access any page with the least amount of clicks from the home page. Search engines usually crawl your website from the home page (with exceptions where your sub-pages have external links pointing to them). If your web pages are accessible with minimal clicks to reach any page of your website, the better and faster they crawl, index, and rank the content. The deeper the links, the lower the chances of them being discovered.
- Use Flat Structure: For a smaller website with less than 20 pages in total, use a flat structure. Flat structures enable all your web pages to be accessed from a single menu on the home page. Use the footer menu and the header menu to ensure that all pages are accessible from the menu. With this kind of site structure, every page is given equal importance, and you can be sure that all the pages will be crawled and linked.
- Organize by Topic Cluster: With entity-based SEO and semantic SEO, the importance of topic clusters has become very significant in the field of content creation and SEO. Topic clusters are web pages closely related to one topic, interlinked with each other. A topic cluster usually has a pillar page but can be created without one (though it is not recommended). A website can have more than one cluster and often has 5-10 topic clusters. Each cluster could have anywhere between 5 and hundreds of pages, depending on the topic. For instance, a website on pets could have a topic cluster for each pet. This would amount to a topic cluster on dogs, one for cats, hamsters, snakes, parrots, lovebirds, and so on. Each topic cluster could have hundreds of pages. For instance, the dogs cluster could have content on dog grooming, foods, breeds, etc., and each cluster will have its own set of content.
- Avoid Orphan Pages: Orphan pages are those pages that are not linked from any pages of your website. These pages are often not crawled, and if crawled, they will not rank well. Every page on your website should be linked from at least one page. Without a link to a page, the chances of Google knowing about its existence reduce significantly. If your orphaned pages are linked from external sources, they may be crawled, indexed, and ranked, but will not add value (link juice) to your other pages that could benefit from it.
- Create Logical Silos: Logical silos are very similar to topic clusters but are logically arranged. A website is a silo of pages that is logically arranged. A website has a home page, which links to sub-pages, and the sub-pages may have sub-sub-pages that are logically arranged. You will have a products section with a silo listing all the products and the company section with a silo on the company details. This helps arrange content and to some extent adds SEO value to your website.
- Maintain Consistent Navigation: Consistent navigation not only helps SEO but also improves user experience. Keep your navigation menu preferably on the top, below the header section, towards the right. This is where people expect navigation menus to be. Do not experiment with navigation menus unless you are sure you could improve the user experience. Many websites have tried to experiment with floating menus on the footer and no menus at all but have failed when it comes to user experience. Yes, some websites have performed well with menus in other areas of the website, but this requires extensive research and user experience knowledge.
- Minimize Subdirectories: Subdirectories are required at times. Many websites order their content in a subdirectory form. This is good and often very sensible. But create subdirectories only when you have enough content to go into each subdirectory. There is no point in creating a subdirectory when you know that there are only 2-3 files in each of the directories. Create subdirectories when you have more than 10 and preferably more than 20 pages in each of the directories.
