When it comes to building a search engine optimized website, the structure of the site is undoubtedly important. While you can potentially change the structure later, it’s more efficient to start off on the right foot with a proper structure from day one. In this guide to SEO site structure from the search engine marketing experts at Thirteen05 Creative, you will learn the basics of how to build a search engine optimized website, which you can potentially do yourself with enough time and effort. If you’d rather avoid the headache and countless hours that it will require you to build a properly optimized website, you can always hire a professional web development agency that specializes in building SEO-friendly websites. That’s where we come in. If you’d rather leave it to the professionals, contact us today for a free quote.
The Basics of SEO Site Structure
Website architecture is an important consideration when developing a new website or improving an existing website, and not just for search engines, but for your human visitors as well. With a proper site structure, your visitors will be able to quickly and easily navigate your website to find what it is they’re looking for. Similarly, with a proper structure in place, search engines will be able to quickly and easily crawl your site with their search engine spiders (bots), allowing them to quickly index your website without missing anything important.
In both cases, if you add webpages to your website that are too many clicks away from your homepage, you may find that both search engines and visitors have a difficult time finding those pages. What this boils down to is internal links.
What Are Internal Links and Why Do They Matter?
The internet largely revolves around hyperlinks, which are often referred to as simply “links.” These links connect not only one website to another, but also parts of a website to other parts of the same site. For example, when you visit our homepage, you will find links to other parts of our website. Those are internal links. An external link, by comparison, is one that points to an external page on the web, such as a webpage on a completely different website.
By utilizing a proper interlinking site structure, search engine crawlers like Googlebot can easily find and index all of the pages of your website. In regards to SEO, this is incredibly important, as ensuring that search engines find and index all of your pages is critical when it comes to improving your search engine visibility, which is what search engine optimization is all about.
Tips For Improving Your Website Architecture
Here are some tips for improving your site’s structure:
- Use internal links to connect/link all of your pages together.
- Implement a “flat” site structure in which any page of your site can be reached in four clicks or less.
- Ensure your website structure is simple, as making it complicated may prove to be increasingly difficult to navigate as your website grows.
- Make use of category pages to keep your website and its various pages properly organized.
- Use a simple URL structure that is logical and concise.
- Make sure you have a sitemap.
As you can see, there’s quite a bit that goes into site structure and this is far from everything to consider. If you’d rather not spend countless hours learning how to properly structure a website, you can always hire a professional. Better yet, you can hire a whole team of professionals, which is exactly what you get when you hire our team at Thirteen05 Creative to build your website. Contact us today to get started on your new website.