Transcript
A well organised website structure is important for both users and search engines. It determines how easily visitors can find information and how effectively search engines can crawl and understand your content.
When done right, a good website structure can improve your visibility in search results and create a better experience for your visitors.
In this lesson, I’m going to walk you through the most important considerations for your website structure and share some tips that can have a major impact on both your site’s performance and your business overall.
Your navigation menu should prioritize the most important pages and make it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. While its primary function is to help users, it can also significantly help you rank pages in search engines, too.
This is because pages featured in your main navigation menu are typically seen as more important to your website for the same reasons I explained earlier about internal links. On top of that, when a page is prominent in the navigation menu, it naturally attracts more visits from your existing users.
Those visits to the page, when combined with positive interaction signals like time on page and engagement, become really powerful ranking signals. Even if Google doesn’t openly confirm it, they are tracking this information through tools like Google Chrome, Android, and Google Analytics.
This is something that I’ve personally tested by driving non-search traffic to a page and consistently observing a boost in rankings.
So, if you have a page that you would like to rank higher, putting it in a more prominent area of your navigation menu is definitely a solid idea.
We’ve already looked at how internal links are important for crawling, but you should also understand that they can play a really important role in ranking your pages, too.
When you internally link to a page, you’re passing what’s called page rank through to the page that you’re linking to, which is basically a measure of a page’s importance based on the number and the quality of links pointing to it.
You can think of this as a vote of confidence from one page to another. These internal links also create relationships between your pages and help search engines to understand how your content is connected, giving you what’s known as topical authority on a certain subject.
This helps search engines to trust that your website is an authority on the topic, which can actually help improve the rankings of all of your other related pages, too. On top of that, it can also help users learn more about the information you’re sharing without having to leave your website.
Where it becomes a bit of a problem is when people start adding internal links to unrelated pages to gain the system, since that can make your content look rather spammy and also ruin your user experience.
But on the other hand, if you add internal links properly where they’d actually help users to learn more about a specific piece of information they’re reading about, it can really really pay off since it can increase your average page views per session, help spread page rank around your website, and help search engines to understand that you’re a really good resource for this topic.
A physical silo structure organizes your content into clear topic based sections through your URL structure. This makes it easier for the search engines to crawl and understand your website’s hierarchy. It also helps with tracking performance tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
For example, if you run an e-commerce site that sells domestic appliances and you decide to add a commercial site to your business, you’d be best to structure your URLs like this: yourwebsite.com/commercial/ for the commercial landing page and then yourwebsite.com/commercial/washing-machines/ for the category page and then yourwebsite.com/commercial/washing-machines/miele-pwm-300-dp/ for the individual product page.
The same will be true of all the other categories, too. For example, yourwebsite.com/commercial/tumbler-dryers/ for the category page, yourwebsite.com/commercial/tumbler-dryers/miele-pdr-944/ for the product page.
Then your commercial appliance repairs page would be at yourwebsite.com/commercial/repairs/. And then you might even have individual repairs pages for each of those appliances at yourwebsite.com/commercial/repairs/washing-machines/ and so on.
This structure clearly shows the relationship between pages and organises your content in a really clean and logical way. It can also help the more tech-savvy users understand where they are on your website just by looking at the URL.
With that being said, physical silos aren’t always necessary for ranking. And I would usually advise against changing the URLs of any of your existing pages that are currently getting traffic just so that they fit inside of a physical silo. If you do, you’re going to have to deal with redirects and potential loss rankings. So, normally, leave it as it is.
However, if you are planning on developing a new section of your website, investing the time into creating a physical silo structure is almost always going to be worth it.
Breadcrumbs are navigational aids that help users understand their current location within your website’s hierarchy and easily move back up to parent pages. They typically appear near the top of the page and consist of a series of links showing the path back to the homepage and other parent sections.
For example, with the MIELE PWM 300 DP commercial washing machine we looked at earlier, the breadcrumb would look like this: Home > Commercial Appliances > Commercial Washing Machines > Miele PWM 300 DP.
This brings several benefits such as helping users to understand their location within your website, providing additional navigation options since it gives users a way to easily navigate up through your site’s hierarchy without relying on the back button or the main menu.
It also helps search engines to understand the site structure and the relationship between your pages. It also creates an additional entry point for crawlers to find the important parenting pages. And because these are all internal links, they also pass that page rank we spoke about earlier, too.
Plus, they can also get pulled into the SERP. You’ll often see breadcrumbs appearing in a SERP listing, which can make your listing look that little bit more polished and professional when compared to your competition if they’re not using them.
We’ve now covered some of the most important aspects of structuring your website. And by applying these principles, you’ll improve your site’s usability, indexation, and rankings in the search engines.
In the next video, we’re going to learn all about keywords. Because even if your website is really well structured and easy for search engines to understand, if you’re not optimising for the phrases that people actually search for, you’re never going to get any traffic from Google.