We bet that the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for business doesn’t need to be explained. These days, when nearly all brands have websites and strive to be noticed by their target audiences on the web, SEO is a tool to make this real. You can signal your value to search engines through keyword research, content optimization, and other SEO best practices and appear higher in their result pages (SERPs). And this can give you a significant competitive advantage.
Okay, SEO sounds like a big deal, but how do you make the most of it? Besides obvious optimization tactics, SEO is affected by many other, less obvious things. And one of them is website structure.
What Is Website Structure?
A website structure (also called architecture) refers to the way information and various site elements are organized on a site. Your site architecture connects all your pages and navigation elements, such as menus, content, and other site components, implementing their logical hierarchy to create a seamless and positive user experience.
What Is the Meaning of Site Architecture for SEO?
If you’re wondering how to build a winning SEO strategy, there will be plenty of things to take care of. Namely, you will have to research and monitor target keywords, keep an eye on your competitors’ tactics, analyze your content, and leverage the obtained insights to optimize your site’s pages. An easy way to handle all these tasks is to leverage specialized SEO software like AI Overview Tracker or similar. But what do you do about your website architecture?
Although it’s sometimes overlooked, architecture website design has a huge impact on SEO and thus has to be among your core optimization practices. This has implications for your optimization in the following ways:
- Helping you implement intuitive and convenient navigation;
- Helping ensure better crawlability and indexability of your pages;
- Ensuring overall better user experience (UX).
4 Key Principles of SEO-Friendly Website Architecture
Now that you know that site architecture impacts your UX and SEO, you must wonder how to plan website structure to help you gain the most benefits.
Here are the key principles of implementing a good site architecture for SEO:
1. URL Structure Optimization
URLs play a big role in overall page architecture. A well-thought-through URL network creates a correct hierarchy and pathways to different pages and content on your site. It can greatly improve user experience, enhance site navigation, and aid search engine indexing when handled correctly. As a result, a proper URL structure can boost your SEO performance and click-through rates.
Here’s how you can optimize your URLs for a proper SEO structure:
- Define a logical path hierarchy for your pages – your homepage should be at the top of the hierarchy, with other category and subcategory pages flowing from it in a logical sequence.
- Keep your URLs concise and, at the same time, descriptive enough to let users know what they will find on a particular page.
- Choose lowercase letters and divide words with characters like dashes to make URLs readable and easy to remember.
- Where possible, integrate relevant keywords right into your URLs for better optimization.
2. Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Design
A mobile-friendly website is a must-have in the modern world. Now that a big share of users prefers to browse the web on the go, making your design responsive is a surefire way to ensure the following benefits:
- Excellent user experience;
- Improved site accessibility;
- Lower bounce rates;
- Better engagements;
- And more.
What’s more, mobile-friendliness also has an empirical impact on SEO. Since Google’s mobile-first indexing implies that search engine bots use the mobile version of a website to crawl and index it, it becomes impossible to rank in SERPs without making your site responsive. So, if you are looking for the best way to structure a website, keep the following mobile-friendliness tips in mind:
- Implement a responsive site layout.
- Mind different screen sizes when planning the placement of menus and navigation elements.
- Keep the names of your menu entries short so that they display well on all screen sizes.
- Optimize the sizes of your media elements.
- Use buttons of responsive sizes and place them strategically on your pages.
- Test your responsiveness regularly.
3. Content Structuring
How your content is organized affects both how it looks on a page and your overall website architecture. Well-structured content can solve multiple issues for you, including reducing the bounce rate, making your text more readable, enhancing user experience and engagement, improving crawlability, and boosting SEO.
Here are the key tips for proper content SEO structure:
- Leverage a balanced number of short and long sentences for easier text comprehension.
- Stick to short paragraphs.
- Integrate header tags of different levels (e.g., H1, H2, H3, etc.) into your copy to boost its readability and ensure better UX and crawlability.
- Add media (e.g., photos, images, infographics, videos, etc.) to break large bulks of text and improve content structure.
- Emphasize the HTML structure for SEO using relevant HTML tags. These tags are bits of code that can help you emphasize different elements/parts of your content to make it easier for search engines to understand, boosting your pages’ crawlability and indexability.
Extra tips for better SEO: Don’t hesitate to put your target keywords in them for higher rankings when integrating header tags. Also, add keywords to your media files’ names and alt texts.
4. XML Sitemaps and Robots.txt
An XML sitemap is a file that contains descriptive information about your site and all elements, such as pages, videos, images, and other elements. The sitemap doesn’t just provide information about these components but also specifies the hierarchy and relationships between them, helping search engine bots crawl your site more effectively.
In order to make your overall website structure and specific page architecture easier to understand for search engines, consider crafting an XML sitemap manually or using specialized tools like XML Sitemaps Generator and submitting the file via Google Search Console.
As for robots.txt, this is the file that let you manage how search engine bots crawl your site. Use these files to prevent bots from crawling unimportant or similar pages on your site, hence, minimizing the load on your site and improving its performance and UX.
Top Architecture Website Design Mistakes to Avoid
Now that you know what website structure is, how it affects SEO, and how to make the most out of it, let’s take a moment to define common mistakes you want to avoid while designing your architecture:
- Lack of clear hierarchy and structure. All pages of your website must take an appropriate place in the overall hierarchy and logically connect to each other.
- A lack of integration between the site’s SEO Structure and its search/navigation feature. For example, when users view a men’s shoes page in an online store, then click on a liked pair and can’t find a way to see more options from that product page. This can be incredibly confusing.
- No dedicated landing pages for category pages.
- Poor site accessibility and lack of mobile-friendliness.
- Slow load times.
All these mistakes can greatly affect your user experience, hence, leaving a print on your SEO as well.
Conclusion
Website architecture has a direct impact on many things, including your bounce rates, user experience, and, of course, search engine optimization. When the site is structured poorly, it can be incredibly hard for search engine bots to crawl and index it appropriately. At the same time, it can become way harder for users to navigate such sites, making them lose traffic.
Now that you know about the huge importance of website structure for your brand image and success, you shouldn’t waste any more time. Use the tips from this article to plan and implement impeccable site architecture that will complement your SEO efforts while also making your users happy and boosting your authority in the industry!