How To Plan A Website Structure

You heard the term "How to Plan/Build a House" many times, right? Yes, without a planned structure, we cannot build a good house. Likewise, to create or to develop a good website, you need to have a plan. In this article, you're going to learn how to plan a website structure that works & helps your SEO efforts.

Generally, all might think that website is a collection of pages. Exactly it is true. But how the pages and content structure is aligned is most important. Website structure is one of the critical primary parts of technical SEO.

What is Site Structure?

Site Structure is nothing but how well are your pages and contents are organized and grouped. It also refers to how the pages are linked and presented to the visitor. Many professionals call as website architecture or framework, or wireframe.

Your website should not have random pages and posts. Important points need to consider during the planning stage of a website structure:

Menu structure and placement
Categorization of products/services
Breadcrumbs
URL Structure
Internal Linking

Before designing your planned site structure, think about the user and Search Engines how they navigate and find accessible.

Why is Good Structure is Important for a Website?

More than 50% of site traffic comes from search, as per BrightEdge. So paying more attention to how delightful the site is or how easy to explore, you'll need to consider how individuals will discover their way to it.

There is a question with few marketers and site owners about the link between site structure and SEO. Below are the reasons you can understand why SEO-friendly site structure is essential.

#1 Better Crawling

Web crawlers of search engines crawl a site structure. Their most important goal is to index web page content to return search results for the query. Good website structure makes the crawlers easy to access and index the content & has the high ranking possibilities in the SERPs.

Identifying the content web crawlers' internal and external links determines the relationships between your site pages. Good website structure is the roadmap for web crawlers and makes a significant impact to search engines.

Another high impact with good site structure finds new pages/posts faster when published.

#2 SiteLinks Opportunities

You have seen sitelinks for some queries in the search result as below:

These sitelinks are automatically generated by the Google algorithm, not by web developers or SEO professionals. How these site links appear? With a simple and easy site structure. Site structure includes the creation of internal links with appropriate anchor text, good title, and description for the pages.

Advantages in having the sitelinks are:

Increase in Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Direct visits to internal pages from SERPs
Good trust signal
Increase brand awareness

#3 Great User Experience

The website's most important purpose is to showcase the services or products to the customers/client. That means the users should be your primary focus.

The website's navigation should be easy for the visitors to find the required information they need. Easy navigation will have a high impact on the conversion ratio as a client.

A well-defined site structure with proper internal linking will help the user find the relevant pages and posts. This will increase in engagement rate and decrease in bounce rate.

#4 Topical Relevance

Topical relevance is the extraordinary authority to the search engines to understand what your website is about. It shows how your different web pages on the site are connected.

If you have a pillar cluster content model on your site, it should be interlinked properly to the keywords you should rank for.

A Good Website Structure Design

While designing a website structure, it is essential to frame the pages' hierarchy to organize the information.

A simple website structure design looks like this.

This structure shows the grouping of the content that comes from the homepage of the website.

How to Build a Good Site Structure?

The plan you make for the proper site structure should work for both the users and the search engines. Check the below points for creating a great site structure that drives visitors and search engines happy.

Planning Page Hierarchy
Creating URL Structure
Navigation Menus
Topics and Keywords
Strategic Internal Linking
Internal Page Depth

Planning Page Hierarchy

This process is straightforward if you are developing a new site. Planning the page hierarchy is best for SEO success. Page hierarchy is the way you organize the pages and information. This will help you to plan pillar cluster model contents. Create main categories and map your relevant sub-categories to the main categories.

Creating URL Structure

Creating a well-defined URL structure is the next key factor in creating a good site structure. Map your sub-categories into their primary category and so on.

For example, you run an online education website.

The URL structure for the science subject would look like this:

https://onlineeducation.com/programs/science

Avoid numbers, special characters, jungle words, underscores in the URL. It should easy to understand by humans and search engines.

Navigation Menus

It is the primary area to focus more on website structure. It helps the users to find the information which they required.

Make your important pages to find and navigate easily. The maximum click to reach the destiny page is two. If you work on an e-commerce site this needs to focus more on categories and sub-categories.

Topics and Keywords

The topics and keywords which you surround the contents in the website pages should be relevant and structured. Segregate your primary and secondary keywords and make a content structure accordingly.

Make your topics that cover your primary keywords as pillar pages and secondary keywords as cluster pages.

Strategic Internal Linking

The internal linking's primary benefit is passing the link authority, which helps the user find the information quickly and the crawler to identify the pages to crawl and index. You can link internally by breadcrumb, context, and navigation.

Internal Page Depth

All the pages on the website are vital for you and search engines to crawl and index. Ensure users or search engines find the required information of the pages with fewer clicks.

Make sure there are no orphan pages on your site. Provide internal links to all the pages and from the home page to the most important pages.

Conclusion

SEO success is not only with a single factor of optimization. Each optimization is essential. Ensure your site structure is crystal clear to the user and search engines because it dramatically impacts SEO success.

Take time to design and develop a good website structure, either for new or existing websites, and achieve your SEO success.

All the Best!