How Website Structure Affects SEO

A common focus in terms of SEO revolves around keywords and keyword research. As important as these pieces are, technical considerations like a website’s structure can fall to the wayside in SEO efforts. There are numerous ways how website structure affects SEO. Fixing these issues is often much easier than you’d expect.

But what makes up a website’s structure? To be clear, the structure of a website, or how a website is set up, is an entirely different focus than website design. Instead of thinking about how a website physically appears, consider how a website’s individual pages are linked together. These pages should be organized in a manner that’s easy for a user, and Google’s spiders, to navigate.

Having an organized website structure is incredibly important for SEO. Without creating something that makes logical sense, your other SEO efforts may be for nothing.

Here’s how website structure affects SEO.

Site Crawlability

In the event that an internet searcher robot experiences a surprising deadlock, it can cause issues for your SEO. As per Matt Cutts, in the past of Google, crawlability is the main factor for averting ordering issues on Google.

Webpage crawlability is a standout amongst the most critical elements with regards to site structure. Crawlability alludes to a web crawler's capacity to creep through your site's whole content substance to make sense of what your site is about. Some portion of this procedure is exploring through subpages and individual subjects to comprehend the site all in all. A site page must have the capacity to take a guest somewhere else inside the site, starting with one page then onto the next, keeping in mind the end goal to be viewed as crawlable.

Internet searcher robots are in charge of site crawling. An essential fundamental of good site crawlability is that there are no deadlocks while creeping through your site.

So how can one enhance site crawlability? The simplest route is to endeavor to incorporate inward connections on each page, which makes an extension starting with one a player in your site then onto the next. Breadcrumbs and related posts can computerize the procedure of site crawlability and inward connecting.

Internal Links

The basics of proper navigation dictate that users should be able to get from one page to another without any difficulties. If your website is large and has many pages, the challenge is making these pages accessible with only a few clicks, using navigation alone. Usability experts claim that it should only take three clicksto find any given page, but use this advice as a guideline instead of a rule.

Categorize and organize links in a way that won’t wreck your website structure. Internal linking works by using keywords within your content and linking these keywords to another relevant piece of content on your website.

The advantages of consciously using internal links for SEO are numerous:

Internal linking allows search engines to find other pages through keyword-rich anchors.
Internal links decrease page depth.
Internal linking gives users an easier way to access other content, which can result in a better user experience.
Search engines are giving greater value to internal links with regards to ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Oftentimes, people will link back to old content through the use of internal links. However, most people rarely do the reverse — going back through old content to link to newer content. Close the loop by making sure both pieces are connected to each other through the use of internal links.

User Experience

The usability standards that today’s website are held to are much stricter than in the early days of the Internet. If a visitor comes across a poorly built website, they will make efforts to avoid interacting with it further.

Additionally, nobody wants to waste their time on a website where they’re not sure what to do next. If a visitor can’t figure out how to find the information they’re after, they will seek it out on someone else’s website.

A bad user experience can have a negative effect on SEO. How searchers interact with a website is interpreted by Google for future search results. Click-through rate, time spent on site, and bounce rate are all signaling factors to Google’s algorithm. Statistics indicating a positive experience validates the search results to Google. Statistics indicating a negative experience tells Google the page may not be the most relevant or useful for that query, and Google will adjust the search results accordingly.

The basics of providing a good user experience include:

Aligning click-through with expectations
Making desired information easy to find
Ensuring that navigation makes sense to the point of intuitiveness

Run some tests with unbiased visitors to determine just how usable your website actually is. Or, use a tool like Inspectlet to determine how real users are interacting with your website.

Duplicate Pages

Duplicate content is really bad for SEO because Google interprets it as spam. A focus on high-quality and unique content on the SERP clearly defines how your website must be structured for ideal SEO.

Google’s Search Console is a useful tool for finding and eliminating duplicate content on your website. It may be possible to repost duplicate content on LinkedIn or Medium but do so with caution. As a more general rule, don’t post duplicate content on your website, or anyone else’s.

Conclusion

For best results, build in proper website structure when it comes to SEO efforts. Even at the beginning stages of a website’s conceptualization, it’s important to plan ahead for content to come. It’s not hard to see how website structure affects SEO, so make sure that your efforts don’t begin and end with keywords!

Official_Sandeep January 05, 2018 21 comments