Why The Structure Of Your Website Is Important
Website structure is often referred to as the architecture of your website or the navigation. It’s essentially how the various webpages are laid out in the menu – how you get to each page and how they’re connected. This is incredibly important to get right for both SEO purposes and for user experience (UX).
How Site Architecture Tells The Search Engines What Your Website Is About
The search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing all use the structure of your website to figure out what content is important and which pages should rank higher. They also use the naming conventions in your URLs to work out what your website is about.
For example, an ecommerce website should have products and categories, which will help the search engines to see what you offer.
www.domainname.com/products/wetwipes
or
www.domainname.com/category/sanitaryproducts/wetwipes
By ordering your website in such a way, you tell the search engines that your business is for selling a particular type of product and this is how they are categorized. This kind of structure also helps you to stay organized when adding onto your website as your business grows.
An expanding website is always a dangerous time if your original architecture wasn’t well thought out.
Good Website Structure Prevents Competition For Keywords On Different Pages
It’s likely that your website has similar content on different pages if you’re regularly adding new content – in a blog or with new but similar products. This is a good thing for SEO. However, if you’re writing about similar topics again and again on your website but don’t have a proper website structure, you’ll end up competing with yourself for ranking on certain keywords. This is because the search engines won’t know where to focus.
Let’s go back to the ecommerce business for baby products. You have product pages and you also write a blog about those products, reviewing them or news about the range. It’s more important that the search engines rank the actual product pages higher than the blog posts because that makes you money. However, unless you tell the search engines which pages you think are more important, they won’t know and you’ll have them trying to rank every page that mentions baby wipes for that keyword.
Your blog posts should therefore be lower down on the internal structure of your website than your product pages. If products and categories come first on the navigation and the blog later on, you’ll be telling the search engines how you rate them in importance.
Proper Navigation Improves Your User Experience
Considering your SEO is always important when you put together a website. This is how you’ll get found online and bring in new customers. However, you also need to consider what will happen when those people you’re trying to attract actually land on your website. If they have a bad experience or can’t find their way through the pages logically, they will click away very quickly and won’t come back.
The good news is that a logical navigation for SEO and for human user experience are really the same. Just like you want the search engines to rank the product pages higher than the blog pages, you also want your potential customers to be on the product pages shopping rather than on the blog pages reading.
If we’re looking at just Google, we also know that the search engine giant puts a lot of weight on user experience. Google actually looks at bounce rates, page load speeds and a number of other elements related to how a human user interacts with a website. The better this is, the higher you’ll rank.
