A well-designed site structure is crucial for any online business, whether you are launching a new site or improving an existing one. Example the-salescompany.nl, a well-structured, low DR site in a competitive niche.
Why Site Structure is Important
A messy website structure can be incredibly confusing for both users and search engines.
Google advises website owners to set up a website with a clear structure for navigation and page layout. The site structure shows Google which pages are the most important.
Setting Up Website Structure
Website structure is the organization you use to organize your website. The structure refers to the website hierarchy of pages, categories, and sections, and how users and search crawlers navigate among your pages.
Building Website Structure
The main reason you should pay attention to website structure is to improve your ranking on Google.
Determining Website Structure
To start, a good site structure and internal links help search engine crawlers find and index the pages.
If your pages are not well linked, it is harder for crawlers to find them and bring you more organic traffic.
But a good website structure is not only about indexability. Because an XML sitemap can fill that gap easily. A good website architecture provides context to search engines, so they understand what your page is about in the grand scheme of your entire website.
Example: Sports website
For example, if you have a sports website, and one of your pages is about the best maintenance for bikes. You could link from your homepage to all of your pages, but because your site is quite large, you would end up with thousands of links on your homepage - which would be confusing for both search engines and users.
Instead, the best way to approach this would be to split your top-level subject by sport.
After each sport, you could have another level of category pages that break down the subject into items used in that sport.
The material zone is where our "best maintenance for bikes" page would fit.