A user-friendly site structure encourages high online traffic. It also increases the ranking of your website in different search engines. That’s why every business organization, big or small, should pay attention to the details of creating their website structure.
Your website shows your vision, your products, your services, and your future goals. The purpose behind the creation of a website is to improve user experience and generate high traffic. You know you need to optimize your site for best SEO practices. A search engine-friendly website should have the capacity to line up keywords and pages and make it easy for crawlers to collect information. But how exactly do you create an SEO-friendly website structure?
In this article, we’ll tell you how you can come up with a friendly site structure. There are various steps you need to adapt to create a well-structured website.
1.) Plan the Hierarchy of Your Site
If you don’t have a website yet or are building your website from scratch, you have the time and perfect circumstances to construct a website whose structure supports SEO techniques. You can think about the services you want to offer, focus on how the site will operate, determine how to design everything, and decide how many pages should be on your website.
Basically, “hierarchy” is a procedure that determines how the site will operate, and then it breaks down those operations into tiny units. The purpose behind this breakdown is to increase the efficiency of your website. The hierarchy will determine the navigation and URL structure of your website. Normally, the hierarchical structure looks like this:
Here are some tips that might help you in the preparation of your site hierarchy:
Keep the structure simple and logical. Do not make it complicated from the very beginning.
Keep the size of your website moderate. At the initial stage, your main pages should be more than 2 and less than 8. Later on, you can add more if needed.
Try to include the same number of subcategories under all main categories.
2.) Create URL Navigation Structure Identical to Your Hierarchy Structure
The second most important step of this process is creating your URL structure. It is important that your URL structure should match your website structure. For example, if you are selling pizzas, your website name is tasty pizzas, and you are selling chicken fajita pizza ... your website URL might look like this: www.tastypizza /food/fast-food/chicken-pizza
Now, this URL has broken down your URL structure into three parts. This URL is showing your Category → Sub-Category → Product name. This type of URL structure is not only SEO friendly, but also easy for crawlers and users to understand the interphase of your website.
3.) Keep Your Website’s Depth Low and Simple
Simplicity enhances the user experience and attracts more data traffic. “Low depth” means that your website has a superficial structure. A shallow structure allows users to access every page of your website just by clicking. A user can find all the information regarding your business just with a few clicks. The simple website structure is SEO friendly in nature. Moreover, Google and other search engines can find your products quickly and rank them higher. Isn’t search engine optimization all about improving the rank of your website in Google’s search engine? If yes, then go with a simple and light structure.
4.) Well-Researched Keywords
When it comes to designing a search engine-friendly site structure, use keywords and carry out research for keywords that are identical or match the basic theme of your website. For example, if you are a fast food brand, you must look at other top food brands like KFC, McDonald’s, etc. See how they have used keywords on their site. Use keyword tracking software properly. Remember, exciting content can generate the high traffic for your website.
5.) Internal Linking
Internal linking is a very helpful and SEO-friendly technique. Base your website structure on internal linking. Internal linking puts the icing on the cake by internally connecting the pages of your website to each other. It allows users and crawlers to explore your website, check out your content quality, and find information that is available on your site. Internal linking is all about click and see, click and see. Internal linking provides you with multiple advantages that can be handy when it comes to SEO optimization.
6.) Place SEO Weight Strategically
Placing the SEO weight is all about distributing the proportion of SEO techniques among your site pages. Every simple web page needs proper SEO optimization to generate profit. So, select the weight strategically. The best way to do it is to prioritize your pages.
The most important page of any online business is About Us page. This page provides a summary of your services and products. That’s why the About Us page often contains highly intriguing content. The second most important web page that requires proper SEO optimization is “Our Products and Services,” as it describes the specification of your products. Thus, the approach you adopt must focus on the pages you want to rank higher in search engines.
7.) Keyword Placement Strategy
The last step toward creating a website with an SEO-friendly structure is the placement of your keywords. Placement of keywords in your URL navigation structures is a very technical tactic. If you own a fast food brand, then you must focus on keywords like delicious, tasty, crispy, spicy, etc. If you own a clothing brand, you should place keywords like quality, color scheme, folding, texture, etc. Sometimes you may need multiple keywords, so use the dashes to separate the keywords in your URL. Keywords create the image and theme of your product. So, guarantee the proper keyword density or weight.