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11
Nov
Webmasters often forget just how important structure is in a website. And it can be an easy mistake to make. You likely add hundreds of pages of content after a site’s initial launch, based on new keyword data or to just get some fresh content up for SEO purposes. But you can easily betray your original site plan, and make your site difficult to navigate. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the human visitors are the only ones that will have difficulty navigating your site. If your URL structure is off, or you have pages that are more than a few clicks from the homepage, Google may take notice as well — which will likely translate into lost rankings.
Why Website Structure Matters
One question that new web developers always seem to get wrong is “what do searchers usually click on first in search results?” The tendency is to repeat the mantra of “the first result.” But this is actually seldom true. Humans aren’t algorithmic robots. If the second result appears more relevant than the first, searchers will almost always click on it before blindly visiting the first result. In a perfect world, the first website on a SERP will be the most relevant page to a search query. This doesn’t always happen, however.
The same concept translates to your website. Every single portion of your site navigation needs to point visitors in the right direction, from the URL structure on down to your individual pages of content. If a site or page appears to lack relevancy in its structure, your bounce rate will soar. If you have a large site, think about how much content you could add before needing to change the navigation – 20%, 25%, 30%? A good rule to follow is that your site navigation is well implemented when you can add 30% more content without a navigation update.
Structuring Your URLs
Navigation is fairly simple to understand if you think about URL structure. Let’s say you have a wireless Internet service lead generation website, mywirelesssite.com, and a piece of content titled Compare T-Mobile 4G internet and CLEAR. As you can see from the page linked to that title, the URL structure is not what you might normally expect, or http://www.mywirelesssite.com/compare-T-Mobile-4G-Internet-and-CLEAR.html. Instead, the web developer shortens the URL to simply include /tmobile-vs-clear. This will ultimately allow for further subpages without the URL getting out of control. For example, the web developer might eventually want to add pages for each state – /tmobile-vs-clear/alaska or even city with /tmobile-vs-clear/alaska/anchorage.
With the original URL structure, the URL for the page could quickly get out of control. Use your URLs to quickly structure your website, not fit keywords into the address — this does nothing but overcomplicate things. With long URLS and poor site structure, your site will be difficult to index, and deep pages may likely not see a SERP for months.
To properly structure your URLs, create a simple spreadsheet that begins with your homepage in column A, mysite.com, for example. Next, think of all the primary navigation pages that you might have. On a business site, these might include services, locations, about us, contact us, and testimonials. These become your first extended URLs as:
- http://mysite.com/services
- http://mysite.com/locations
- http://mysite.com/about-us
- http://mysite.com/contact-us
- http://mysite.com/testimonials
If you were to flesh out one of those sections (we’ll use services as an example), your URL structure might begin to look something like:
- http://mysite.com/services/roofing
- http://mysite.com/services/painting
- http://mysite.com/services/scaffolding
- http://mysite.com/services/paving
- http://mysite.com/services/refinishing
Everything looks clean and simple, and it’s clear what each page’s relevance to your overall site is simply by looking at the URL. You could have done it the hard way with something like http://mysite.com.com/roofing-services. But, to a search engine, this looks like a whole new category in itself, and can get messy when it’s time to update content, update your navigation, or even switch up your design/coding.
Google offers some additional tips on URL structure, including warning site owners to not create URLs that are long ID numbers rather than easy to read words.
Addressing Physical Site Navigation
Take a look at the irs.gov site map. You’ll notice some fairly broad categories like “Individuals,” “Businesses,” and “Retirement Plans Community.” Not only are these clear in the site map, but you can locate each category in the top navigation of the site. While the site could still use some work on structure, and the site map is a bit out of date, you can see the main idea – just about every page on the site is two or three clicks from the homepage, even though the site is quite large.
With the Panda update, Google has placed emphasis on two major things – high quality content and intelligent site structure. The main reason why many theorists believe content mills are tanking in the SERPs is because they can’t possibly organize millions of pages to be only a few clicks from the home page because they were never really meant to be organized that way.
Structuring Content
The majority of Internet readers tend to scan content, not read it in its entirety. A study as early as October 1997 found that 16% of web readers read content word-by-word. Do you really think that’s changed in a social media era dominated by the likes of “teaspoon content” sites like Twitter and Facebook? This scanning makes it necessary to properly structure content to get the most important ideas to your readers as quickly as possible. Beyond using bulleted lists, lower word counts, specific (not clever) subheads, and highlighted keywords, you have to pay close attention to your page’s HTML structure.
It should go without saying that you should have an “H1″ or title tag for every page – this is important for structure and SEO. But you should also include 2-3 H2 subheads, and even an H3 for a sub-subhead. Just like the larger text helps break up content for readers, the subhead tags help search engines scan your pages faster, and determine relevancy more accurately.
Site structure really comes from careful planning, intelligent design, and a commitment to providing high quality, relevant content. Beyond some of the more technical aspects like using proper code and paying attention to URL structure, most aspects of a site’s structure should fall into place naturally. Remember that organization is paramount, and your site should be fine.
Tags: Web Site Development, Website Designs & SEO, Website Development and Designnone
