You have a plan pal? Because if you don't you're setting yourself up to fail.
Do you know how to plan your website structure? Believe it or not, it actually has an impact on your SEO as well as how people use your website. We’ll give you the low down on how to understand a website’s structure and properly plan out the structure of your website so that its user friendly, for both humans and robots.
An easy, and often made mistake is to not organize your website properly. This often comes up as inexperienced website makers build out their website without planning.
This makes it not only more difficult for users to navigate, but also for search engines to crawl.
If a user is not able to navigate around your website easily and find more content quickly, they will often leave just as fast. Costing you valuable visitor time on your website and clams from sales.
If Google is not able to easily crawl your website and understand its structure, you’ll lose out in rankings due to your disorganization. Again, costing you traffic and sales.
You can generally break up pages on a website into four different kinds of pages.
- Home pages – the first page that visitors land on when going to your website such as www.google.com is the home page for Google.
- Top level pages – These are pages that have a singular purpose and include pages like “contact us” or “about us” pages.
- Category pages – these exist to host links to induvial articles or products.
- Article or product pages – these are the individual pages on a website and will have only one article and a few links to related pages or feature a single product and links to other related products.
With each of these pages you should be structuring your website in a way so that the home page is at the top, top level pages and categories under that, and articles or products under category pages.
Understanding URL's
Another common issue that I see is poorly structured URL’s.
I’ve previously talked about utilizing keywords properly in URL’s. But there is another layer of how they should be structured to make it easier to navigate for both users and search engines.
However, this advice only applies to the end of the URL, for the rest of the URL, the same advice that I gave for structuring your website applies.
Let’s break this down
“www.example.com” is your home page.
You may see this also referred to as a “root directory” or just “/”
“www.example.com/a-category” is a top-level category.
Note the “/” after the .com, this indicates a category or page directly “under” the home page in the URL.
“www.example.com/a-page” is a top-level page on the website.
“www.example.com/a-category/a-page-on-the-site” this is an individual article or product page on a website, note that it is “under” both the home page and the category page.
This URL structure should follow the same layout that you are using for the structure of your categories. For instance if you have a “Tools” category with a sub-category called “Power Tools” the way you structure your URL should look something like this,
“www.example.com/tools/power-tools/example-page”
Laying out your website's structure and URL's
Now that you can “read” URL’s we can move on to how to plan your website’s structure properly.
Ideally, you’ll be able to do this process before you start building your website out and have search engines start crawling it. Attempting to modify your website’s URL structure after you have made it live is not only complex, with old URL’s needing to be pointed at new URL’s with what are called redirects.
Unless you are only redirecting a handful of pages, you should see professional support in working through a full website restructuring. As if it is done improperly, it will cause loss of rankings, lost back links, and penalties to your website’s performance as it checks against all of your redirects before giving a visitor a copy of a webpage.
Now that you understand that this process is best started before you build your website. We can talk about how to go about it.
I recommend getting a mind mapping software such as X-Mind, as I find it’s useful to have a visual representation of how the website is laid out.
- Start with your home page.
- Decide what top level categories you are going to have for content on your website.
- Keep in mind any other categories that you might end up expanding into later.
- If the top-level categories are broad enough add subcategories
- Take care not to be too granular.
- You don’t want to bury your content in multiple levels of sub-categories.
- This can result in bloated and difficult to navigate menus and unnecessarily long URL’s.
- There are ways of managing this but for most websites many categories and sub-categories is not necessary.
- You are probably not Amazon.
- Decide what article pages or product pages are going to be in each category and be consistent with new pages as they are added to the website.
- It will make no sense if you have a category about flowering plants and then add a page to it about fertilizers.
- Note any top-level pages that you need.
- About Us page.
- Contact page.
- Services page.
- Privacy Policy page.
- Etc.
- Structure your URL’s to match this same structure that you are using for your categories.
- Make sure that all category pages are linked to with a header menu that appears on the top of all pages on your website.
- The header is a section of your website that always appears on the top of all pages.
- Make sure that pages such as your privacy policy, links to your social media pages, site map (a full list of all pages on your website for search engines like Google) are linked in your footer.
- The footer is a section of your website that always appears on the bottom of all pages.
- Reorganizing Existing Websites URL’s
- Knowing when and how to reorganize your website’s URL structure is a difficult and complex topic.
- Most URL reorganization efforts will have different needs based on the unique circumstances of each website.
- Employing 301 redirects and other redirect types correctly and not adversely affecting your website’s existing rankings is not a one size fits all endeavor and expert advice should be sought.
Linking your pages
Now that you have a solid foundation to build on, well defined categories, sub-categories, and the pages that you need. You can start to create additional pages such as informational blog posts, product pages, and more.
As you are building out these pages think about how each page relates to other pages and link them to each other. I go into more detail about inter page linking in this post.
A final warning about restructuring your URL's
I know that I have already touched on this, but again, if you are thinking about changing your website’s structure after you have already built it don’t do this without knowing what you are doing.
For each 301 redirect that you add, you will slightly slow down your website, since the server has to process them before giving a page to a user, and if you can create other issues such as redirect chains and loops that cause errors. This is not to mention the potential loss of links if they are not implemented correctly. The last thing that you want is for search engines or users to run into a dead link on your website.
Ideally, you’ll want to only a handful of absolutely necessary redirects.
If you are thinking about a major change to your website that requires a restructuring of its URL’s be sure to bring in expert help that can help you to determine if it is needed and how to best conduct the process.
Wrapping Up
Structuring your website properly is more important than you realize. It’s one aspect of making a website that people want to use and search engines can understand. If you want to learn more about getting started with SEO for your website, we have a comprehensive guide to local SEO that covers not only structuring your website, but so much more.
You can get our free guide below.
SEO Sins: Guide to Local SEO
Learn how to avoid the most common SEO mistakes that will cost your business big money. This comprehensive guide shows you everything you need to know to get started with the basics of local SEO.
