What is a Website Structure and How Does it Impact SEO?

Last updated on June 12th, 2023 at 07:37 am

Your website structure is an important part of technical SEO.

The truth is that the way you structure your website and its pages can affect your search visibility more than you know.

This blog article explores every aspect of website structure, including how it impacts SEO and ways you can build a great structure for your website.

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What is a Website Structure?

Website structure is defined as the way you organize and arrange the content of your website.

This particularly relates to the posts and pages on your website. It is usually related to the way you link, categorize and display your content in a way that shows relationships in topics.

This can be accomplished through using taxonomies, such as internal links, tags and categories, navigations and breadcrumbs to optimize your site structure.

If it is properly done, your users will find it simple to navigate your site. Furthermore, Google can easily index your links!

Why is Site Structure Important?

With a great site structure, your content can be fully indexable and accessible by search engines.

It is through website structure that search engine crawlers can learn more about your page relevance and boost your visibility in search results pages.

Your users can also simply and seamlessly discover the information they are interested in, which will contribute to a positive user experience. (A Google ranking criteria.)

With a structured website, it is simple to detect any SEO issues and fix problems that are hindering your content from becoming visible on SERPs.

So, here are the main reasons why site structure is important for SEO:

It assists search engines in learning how relevant your content is.
It simplifies the process of navigating your site. Users can explore your site and discover what they want easily.
It assists in fixing SEO issues like orphaned pages, broken links or orphaned pages.

It boosts your website visibility on SERPS by making it more crawlable.
Your site structure lets Google understand the organization of your pages and their importance.

Let me explain them in more detail:

Site structure assists search engines in learning how relevant your content is

It allows search engines to pinpoint how your pages relate to one another across your website. This improves their relevance.

For instance, assuming you have a post on your blog titled “What is SEO?”.

If there are internal links from other SEO posts on your website, Google will have an idea that the content has a relationship with other SEO content and will rank better.

Site structure simplifies the process of navigating your site

If your website is structured properly, your users can easily get the information they want.

For instance, if your website is structured in a hierarchical manner, users will find it simple to access the content that they need by going through your website’s sections & pages.

This boosts user experience and improves the odds of your visitors returning.

It assists in fixing SEO issues like orphaned pages, broken links or orphaned pages

Site structure assists in rectifying SEO problems like orphaned pages or broken links by ensuring your content is highly indexable and correctly linked.

If your website has similar content on multiple pages, then the issue of duplicate content may arise.

This is not in any way advantageous because it limits search engine crawlers from indexing your pages thoroughly. That is the reason you have to review your website for duplicate content and rectify them.

Pages without internal links to other pages on your website are known as orphaned pages. This is problematic because search engine crawlers may not properly crawl these pages, limiting their indexability.

It boosts your website visibility on SERPS by making it more crawlable.

With a proper site structure, you can assist in making your pages more indexable and crawlable, meaning your content will have increased visibility.

You should know that every site has a very limited crawl budget, so it will be to your benefit if your website is structured in a manner that simplifies the process of search engine crawlers to index and learns more about your content.

This leads to better SEO results.

Ideal Site Structure

The ideal site structure allows users to navigate and discover content easily and also ensures search engine crawlers can seamlessly index and crawl your pages.

This is possible by setting up a webbed or hierarchical structure. Also, ensure your navigation is simple and clutter-free. Adding logical page hierarchies can also help.

Don’t forget to optimize your URLs and page titles to adhere to the best SEO practices. This will improve the relevance of your pages.

The next question is, “what is the way the ideal site structure?”.

A properly-structure website can be likened to a pyramid, organized with levels of information.

They include:

Homepage
Navigation (Menu and Breadcrumbs)
Taxonomies (Categories and Tags)

Individual Pages and Posts

Homepage

This is the most important page in the structure of a website and has to encompass links to the key entire sections of your site.

Navigation

Besides having an organized homepage, your site should have a structured navigation ( made up of a menu and, generally, the breadcrumbs. ).

The menu should be clutter-free, simple to understand and comprise the key pages of your website.

It is important that your visitors locate these elements without hassle. It also assists them in adequately understanding your content layout.

This is the reason we suggest that you add your key categories to the menu.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are important and highly functional.

They are an integral part of your site’s hierarchical structure.

With breadcrumbs, your visitors can see where a page is ( or its placement) in the site structure.

This makes your site more navigable and organized.

Taxonomies

These consist of your site’s tags and categories.

They are important for your website structure. Tags help in displaying the relationship between content, while categories help in your site’s organization.

For instance, if you own an ecommerce site and you sell shoes, you can include sub-categories such as “Children shoes,” “Male shoes,” and “Ladies shoes.”

Your tags should be able to pinpoint the relationship between your content. For example, if your blog post is about “Adding Schema Markup to a WordPress site” and another “Meaning of Schema Markup,” you can easily use the tag “Schema.”

Individual Pages and Posts

Each post or page has to have a separate title, meta description and URL. This will assist search engine crawlers to learn better about the relevance of each page.

Furthermore, ensure all pages have contextual links to other pages across the navigation menu and the page’s bottom.

This assists visitors in exploring your site smoothly and guides search engine crawlers to identify your content.

How to Improve Your Website Structure

You have to ensure that your website structure is properly done from the beginning because it is important for SEO.

Site Crawlability

It is essential to ensure your site is highly indexable and crawlable.

Fortunately, popular SEO tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb and DeepCrawl will check for technical problems or crawling difficulties in your website that negatively impact your SEO performance.

Spiders/search engine bots are responsible for crawling websites. Thus, you have to make it easy for them to access your website by following SEO best practices.

A search engine bot has to crawl your individual pages for indexing to take place. It has a limited capacity to do this within a specific time frame.

You have to improve your website’s crawlability by:

Keeping your content fresh.
Reduce the incidence of crawl errors.
Prevent Google from accessing your non-canonical URLs

Prevent Google from accessing your non-canonical URLs

When non-canonical URLs are crawled, it can negatively affect your ranking.

Thus, ensure your pages have a single URL that can be indexed. This will prevent SEO problems from occurring and helps your page to be highly effective.

Reduce the incidence of Crawl Errors

You have to ensure that search engines can find it simple to crawl your pages without hitches.

When an error occurs, they may find it difficult to successful index or crawl your website properly.

Utilize Google Search Console to identify crawl errors and rectify them on time.

Keep your content fresh

If your content isn’t fresh, it will be regarded as “stale.”

You always have to update your content to prevent it from being stale.

This not only improves your content relevance and indexability but helps search engines learn more about your page.

One of the best SEO practices is to keep creating new blog articles to keep your website interesting and grow your engagement.

This will positively impact your organic traffic and engagement rates.

URL Structure

It is essential to ensure that your pages are SEO-friendly. One way to achieve this is by adding that your URLs are descriptive, brief and have relevant keywords.

For instance, rather than creating a long URL such as “example.com/items/mens-shoes/sneakers,” it can be “example.com/mens-sneakers.”

You also have to organize your URLs in a sensible manner. For example, you can create categories like “Ladies sneakers,” “men sneakers,” and “children sneakers.”

Add Relevant Keywords

Include relevant keywords to your URLs to improve the crawlability of your page. It can also boost rankings and draw organic traffic.

For instance, if your page is about “Men’s trousers,” ensure you add the keywords “men” and “trousers” to your URL.

Topic Clusters

Topic clustering is a technique that groups content that is centered around a topic.

This implies building content that revolves around relevant themes and linking them accordingly. With this, search engine robots understand your page thoroughly.

It will assist visitors in getting more relevant information on your website, which can contribute to higher engagement rates.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is another effective strategy to optimize your website structure.

It is the process of adding links across your blog articles and pages on your site, and it assists search engines in learning which pages are highly essential.

Internal links let visitors discover relevant information and offer a pleasant user experience, improving the time they invest in your site.

Another important reason for internal linking is that it enables an even distribution of link equity, which optimize your website’s performance on SERPs.

User Experience

Visitors are not only on your website to look for information – they seek a pleasant user experience.

Your website structure has to be easily navigable and assists visitors in discovering what they need without hassles.

To achieve this, you have to ensure that you have a clear and logical hierarchy.

Make the process of searching easy for your visitors by offering simple-to-follow navigation paths and preventing obstacles, which can be unpleasant (and cause people to exit your site).

Mobile-Friendly

Ensuring visitors can easily access your website on mobile devices is one way to improve your site’s mobile friendliness.

For a WordPress website, this is simple. All you have to do is install a responsive theme, which will allow your site to appear nice and work well on multiple devices, like tables, phones and PCs.