Site Structure Simplified – Why is it Important?
The first thing you need to know about site structure is that without it, your website would make no sense. If there wasn’t a solid structure to your site, the content you have to offer would appear to be a random collection of information. Secondly, having a good site structure helps search engines such as Google recognise which pages or blogs from your website are most important. In this blog, we are going to break down how a good site structure can not only improve your site’s usability and findability, but also how it can increase your chances of ranking in search results.
The Web Visitor – Usability and Findability
Usability simply means how easy your website is to use. If a potential customer visits your website and can easily access the information they are looking for, it is much more likely that they will return. Having a well-structured site makes using your website a lot easier. In the modern world where time is valuable, people don’t want to waste time trawling through masses of information to find what they need. The more clear, concise, and categorised your website is, the better the User eXperience (UX).
The Search Engine – Site Structure for SEO
It is important to make sure that you have a well-structured website as this can improve your ranking on search engine result pages. We will now touch on some important reasons why this may be the case.
It gives Google a helping hand
The way that you structure your website highlights to Google where the most important information can be found on your website. This means the better your site structure is, the easier Google can crawl your website, and in turn identify your website to be useful. Which is exactly what we want!
Stops you from competing with yourself
When we talk about ‘the competition’ we’re usually referring to other businesses in same field as our own business. If your website is not well structured, you could actually be competing with yourself for a higher ranking on Google. Now this may sound like a positive, but it isn’t. Imagine you have 12 pages on your website that have ‘wireless keyboards’ as a target keyword. It is essential that you highlight to Google which page is most important. One way of achieving this is through a sound site structure containing internal links.
Keeps your website updated and organised
Making sure that your website is well structured makes it easier to manage your content. As your website grows you may find that you have new products or content available to your customers. If this is the case, it is important to ensure that Google understands which information needs priority. For example, you had written a blog in 2016 about the population of the UK. Then one year later you had written another blog about the same topic. It might be a good idea to have an internal link on the 2016 blog directing users to the more updated version.
In Summary
Having a good site structure is crucial in the digital world. It makes sure visitors to your website can find the information they need easily and helps improve your ranking on search engine results pages. Now you know how important site structure is, find out how to use; Tags, Internal linking and Taxonomies to improve your own websites structure!
