What Is Website Architecture? Building An Seo

23 June 2021

Your website should have a hierarchical structure – The focal point is the homepage and then all other pages should be grouped into categories based on their type. Ideal Site Structure for an eCommerce WebsiteOn top of the structure we have the homepage and then the content grouped into several categories. Ideal Site Structure for a News WebsiteA news website such as an online magazine can group content into a number of categories based on the type of content and when it was published. If a customer is just window shopping on your site, they won’t make a beeline straight to the product they want.

These tags will typically be shown in a post’s metadata or a theme may include a tag cloud widget in a sidebar. If a user clicks a tag, they will be directed to an archive of all posts that also contain that tag. The primary navigation menu in your site’s header, which helps visitors quickly access key areas on your site. Having a logical, optimized site structure will create a more user-friendly experience for your visitors and it can also help you improve your site’s search engine optimization .

Topic And Keyword Research

Search Engine Optimization itself is an attempt to decode the algorithms of search engines and create websites according to what they will like. Search engines, on the other hand, are trying to set up algorithms to decode what the people who search will like. Thus, SEO is all about creating websites that will be found and appreciated by people who search, and that’s how your website structure plan will help you with user experience too. Once you know how you’ll organize your content, use your site’s header and footer navigation to make it easy for visitors to access important details. Remember, your header should just have a few top-level items for the most important content on your site, while your footer can include more “deep” links and utility pages. Having internal links to the rest of your pages makes their job easier.

• Like most design questions, there’s no single right answer, and going too far to either extreme will backfire.
• The information on the page itself is very important, and in some cases you’ll want them to take action to buy a product or fill out the form already there and then.
• Some people may know a lot about a topic while others may know nothing, and you have to consider both perspectives.
• In the past we used to create flat websites with lots of pages targeting specific keywords but that’s no longer the case today.
• It makes sense to define your topic clusters, determine your pillar page for each cluster, and then expand to plan the supporting content.

He notifies readers upfront that his inbox is overflowing and offers instructions on how to get time-sensitive requests through. Like the about page, your contact page is an essential website component as well. Make it easy for people to contact you, whether that’s through a contact information form, email, phone number or on social media.

Don’t just go and create a new category because you realized it’s a good idea but first think how your overall structure should look like and then start making changes. While there are a number of actions to follow to protect your rankings, there is always a risk involved when changing either the content or structure of an existing website. So, you need to have a good plan to follow to minimize the risk.

Preparation: Website Structure

Many times this is not well thought out and is a detriment to the project as a whole. A great website architecture links the article to the product or service to allow users to move from one page to another smoothly. All category pages should be designed similarly, and all blog posts should follow a similar structure.

Although it’s frequently used interchangeably with “website architecture,” it’s actually a much broader term. Website architecture is a subcategory of IA that specifically relates to websites. Once mapped out, site structure is further defined through elements like breadcrumbs, URL structure and navigation. And you need to think carefully about the way you structure your navigation menus.

Topic clusters are a group of content that revolves around a central topic and use a pillar page to link to and from. In short, topic clusters are centered around a single topic and offer multiple internal linking opportunities to keep readers on your site. No one wants to spend an age looking for the content that they’re after. A good website architecture makes it easier to find pages and posts in as few clicks as possible, keeping users engaged and stopping them from bouncing. Your homepage header menu should remain the same on every other page of your site.

As tempting as it might be, refrain from overdoing it and only include links to pages that make sense there. If designed intelligently, it can serve both bots and users. Sidebar navigation usually provides additional segmentation of content. Too many links will water down the importance of pages and make the navigation bar less intuitive. When creating your structure, make sure not to reinvent the wheel and work with predictable elements.

If Google can’t crawl all of your website’s pages, it’s going to struggle to index them. However, you shouldn’t face this issue with the right structure as all content should be linked to from at least one other page. Topical SEO is a big deal, and your site’s structure is a key way to showcase how different pages and posts are connected. This acts as an additional ‘roadmap’ for Google to use when crawling your site. Your site structure can become very unstructured, very fast if you don’t stick to the plan. The ideal church website site structure is made up of a number of elements.

This makes it easier to keep relevant content close together on your site. The website used in the above example shows good use of how this is done. For example, they have their ministries all categorized under Gather. They then have a page for each ministry as a sub-menu item.

Dozens of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes. If figuring out these details for your situation feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. If you want some help creating a great-looking site with an optimized structure, we offer a service to build a website for you.

You can use the Keyword Magic Tool to help you to find the keywords that your prospects are using to find businesses just like yours. At this stage, these ideas are more to get you thinking about those that are referenced by others creating content in this space. Start with those that align closely with your products and services. To maximize the benefits from your link building strategy, you need to make sure that you’re properly distributing link authority throughout your site.

Why Should You Care About Good Website Architecture?

Internal links also pass important link equity, or PageRank, to key lead generating landing pages throughout your site. One of your top user interface design goals should be to help users find exactly what they want as quickly as possible. So if it’s easier to locate a casino exit than your product pages, follow these tips to shorten the customer journey.

Email marketing guide Explore the email essentials for a successful campaign. MailerLite Academy Join free online courses and get certified in our Academy. This background knowledge is essential to achieving the right balance between a breadth and depth in your hierarchy.

Now a sitemap can be just a list of pages, like you find with the sitemap.xml files that search engines read. But for the purpose of planning it’s good to prepare a visual representation, commonly seen as an outlined list or a breakdown chart . Therefore it’s useful to establish which pages are your “cornerstone pages” that you want to focus on. Now, let’s talk about when you should use categories and tags to organize your content. Generally, you’ll want to use child categories for specific topics that you regularly write about and tags for very narrow topics that aren’t regular features on your site. Like most design questions, there’s no single right answer, and going too far to either extreme will backfire.

Curated Navigation Menu

This means that if you want to link to a category page from your homepage don’t just add an image and link to it but have a text link as well. There are some rules to follow when creating categories, either for the products and services you are offering or for your blog. For example, blog posts should be grouped into blog categories and placed under the ‘Blog’. If you are offering services, these can be grouped under services. From faceted search to pagination, some of the most user-friendly options often necessitate a double-check on canonical tags so you don’t create duplicate website content. Make sure all versions of each web page canonicalize to their parent page, and use absolute URLs.

How To Build Your Website Architecture For Seo

Flat hierarchies tend to work well if you have distinct, recognizable categories, because people don’t have to click through as many levels. When users know what they want, simply get out of the way and let them find it. You can use card sorting to help decide how to structure the information in the way users think about it. Tree testing can help validate the structure by allowing users to attempt to find information in the proposed hierarchy. This is different than the XML Sitemap you need to create and submit to search engines.

These links appear within your text, and can lead someone to a section of your site if the want to read more about a topic. Categories and Tags are taxonomies are used to add to your posts so they can be easily found and sorted on your website. A more simple tool is Octopus.do that I came across recently. It’s a more lightweight option focused on visualizing sitemaps, and it allows you to show what content sections you’ll have in the designs for each page. Before you embark on the exciting phase of designing a new website for yourself or your client, it’s important to plan the website readability for it.

Search Engine Optimization Seo

So regardless of how beautiful the website is, or how easy it is to navigate, you’ll need to consider how people will find their way to it. At WordPress.com, our mission is to democratize publishing one website at a time. Create a free website or build a blog with ease on WordPress.com.

Use Categories To Group Related Content

Links should flow throughout your site, enticing visitors to visit more and more pages. Usually categories are used to broadly categorize posts into different areas. These categories then dynamically create a page that contains all posts within a certain category. This allows users to easily find the content related to a certain area. Generally, you should assign just one category (and perhaps one sub-category if your site is very large) to each post.

What Is The Ideal Site Structure?

Users commit with their mouse, and when they roll to a menu item, they want to click, but if it expands and offers other options, it can draw them away from the desired action. This can confuse users of what the actual substance is behind those formats. From an SEO perspective, Google is happy when they know more.

Keyword cannibalizationcan prevent your site from ranking as well as it could when two or more pages that have the same intent compete with one another. The right website structure can make it easier to stop this issue from occurring due to a clearly defined place on your site for a particular topic or piece of content. To earn high-quality backlinks, you want to have different pages answering different questions. This way, you have several pages across your domain that are beneficial to users.

If you’re already an SEO expert, I’m sure you have your own methods that go beyond what we can cover here. If you want to create the best experience for your visitors, you should plan out your site structure early in the site-building process. Typically, you’ll want to aim for no more than 8-10 parent categories. Nothing bad will happen if you go beyond that, but having 10+ parent categories can be a sign that your parent categories are too narrow. Both categories and tags help you group your content together, but they do so in different ways so it’s important to understand the differences. We’re starting with categories and tags because how you structure them could play a role in how you configure the other navigation areas on your site.

Search engine bots are unlikely to crawl pages buried deep in the structure. Ideally, the user should be able to determine if the content is relevant to them or not by simply reading the headings. However, defining the purpose and assigning pages call-to-action can help clear the vision and adjust the content and labels. This knowledge, in turn, is invaluable in designing an intuitive website architecture. If you’re optimizing or redesigning something that’s already live, you should have clear goals for why you want to change things and what you expect to achieve. Good website architecture helps users sift through the growing amount of information on the internet.