The Website Structure Improvement Checklist

That means that your users should be at the heart of everything you do. Following the SEO best practices when it comes to structuring your site is crucial. Before building the website structure, you need to do keyword research that will help you know more about the needs of your target audience.

If you have products, take professional, high-quality photos of them. Get three to four shots of the product to show it from different angles. Customers want to see what they are going to buy, so product images will be vital for driving sales and interest on your website. The Quick Start Wizard makes launching a new WordPress site fast and easy — no coding or CSS knowledge required. You’ll also get access to thousands of free themes and plugins, daily backups, automatic WordPress core software and security updates, and GoDaddy’s award-winning 24/7 support.

You might assume that the primary and secondary navigations are marked in a wrong way on the image above, but I believe that this is not the case. If one how to plan a website structure category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories.

A big advantage from a database structure is that it can be personalized to meet your needs. It can also be built over time since it is bottom-up so you don’t need to worry about making it perfect right away. As your website grows, your previous database files will become part of their own dataset under the new, larger structure. A challenge with top-down structures is everything needs to be planned out from the start.

It’s important to note that you don’t need all these keywords. There are free tools that help you be aware of the process that you can try. Any design of a website illustrates to Google the pages of the site that are most significant. It’s to focus on delivering a beneficial experience to the users. A linear website structure displays content in sequential order from one page to the next.

how to plan a website structure

Your site’s structure is how the different pages on your site are linked with each other using internal links and their hierarchy. It is how the information on your site is organized and presented so that the algorithm can read its context well. Good website structure facilitates easy navigation for both users and crawlers which improves the SEO ranking of your website in search engines.

A Visual Sitemap is a hierarchical diagram reflecting the actual structure of your website. The main reason of this tool’s popularity is the complete comprehension of the structure that it gives to the UX designer. At the beginning of development the site map diagram allows you to look ‘down upon’ your project, to estimate its scale and to work out errors.

Ways For Creating A Website Structure Thats Optimized For Seo

This structure should mainly be considered when a website has a narrow focus as broad topics might be overwhelming for users. For example, this would make sense as a training database for company systems or fan-based websites for popular TV shows. A matrix structure is one of the oldest structure types on the internet. It’s complex and non-traditional that is best navigated using search and internal links.

  • On MailChimp, the location of the primary navigation for logged-in and logged-out users is the same, but the content of the menus is different.
  • No matter what kind of site you have, your users should be able to find what they need in as few clicks as possible.
  • Your market research, keyword analysis and domain strategy will direct you to the right niche.
  • Convenient and clear website structure has a direct impact on users’ behavior and the bounce rate.
  • All of your copy and content will be positioned to subtly promote your USP and drive website visitors to buy from your brand.
  • An external link is used to indicate a link to another external website.

An effective site structure improves usability and user experience which makes web structuring an important step in the web design process. The UXPin platform makes it easy for you to design, prototype and structure your website as you collaborate with other team members and designers. Drop-down menus like this can be really useful for displaying your site’s categories. Websites are a primary marketing tool for modern businesses, which means you should always try to propel users to the desired goal in the least number of clicks without confusion.

There are over 9 billion websites in the world, so it’s safe to say that there is a lot of diversity on the web. However, even though most sites look different, if you peel back the surface, most are based on a few simple site architecture types. Website structure and site architecture are based on the same kind of structure we use to organize the table of contents in a book. A well-thought site structure is one of the factors that make the best websites stand out. The pros of building your site architecture this way is that it gives a very straightforward structure for both users and search crawlers to follow. The final touch to your perfect website architecture will be your approach to internal linking in the content.

Create Your Content

Many areas of the website are accessible to both logged-in and logged-out members, which keeps the navigation fairly simple; but only members may post content. Closed card sorting is when participants are given cards with content topics as well as the categories to put them into (and even sometimes sub-categories). This option is great for exiting websites with established categories, menus, etc. Card sorts are a way to have website visitors organize and label content.

how to plan a website structure

Card sorting is commonly used in information architecture and can help Web designers answer all of these questions even before the design phase begins. Card sorting basically helps designers organize navigation, especially complex navigation, in the most efficient way possible. Our team usually asks a LOT of questions before designing a site, but that’s only because we want the answers that will help us deliver superior and successful solutions. Crafting an elegant and powerful website requires detailed planning and careful execution from the first step to the very last. That’s why we emphasize the value of strong information architecture practices for our clients, whether they are creating a completely new site or renovating an existing one.

Defining Your Target Audience

The only way to truly know who your audience is and what they want, think and need is to do research. To get insights into your target audience, you can do a few things. You may think you already know who your target audience is.

You must first understand their typical needs and problems, and then have options available that solve them. Conversion rate optimization is an important component of SEO. It’s like running ads for a 5 star hotel when you only have crackers and candy ready to serve. You’re not sure of her budget, or age, or other important information that influences her buying decision.

The default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags. The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website and you want to make the best possible use of it. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to instantly grasp what you’re writing about or selling.

how to plan a website structure

Vague messaging will not only prevent your target audience from being drawn to your brand, but it will also draw in the wrong type of customers. When your communication isn’t targeting the right audience, you may attract unqualified leads and customers who can’t benefit from your offerings. You will struggle with building lasting customer loyalty and affinity. When your brand and marketing messages are weak and generic, they won’t resonate with customers.

Website Structure Best Practices

When we design websites for clients, one of our first steps is planning their website structure. A thoughtful structure is crucial for success, whether we’re redesigning their existing site or building a new site. The primary navigation menu in your site’s header, which helps visitors quickly access key areas on your site.

How Costly Is Strategic Seo?

Once you have them, we like to use the free version ofDynalist.io— a minimalist app that helps organize ideas — to plan our SEO silos. Now that we understand why website architecture is so important, let’s look at the core principles you should follow to achieve top SEO rankings through website architecture. This may explain why this last single review page gets more than 3,000 organic traffic, according toAhrefs(that’s a lot!), even though it only has 5 external referring domains.

How To Plan A Website Structure For Seo

When you don’t know who you are trying to attract, you can’t build a brand with a point-of-view. And without a strong brand identity, you risk looking like everyone else in your industry. Sell an eBook to your audience — You need to funnel users to your eBook product pages and have a way for them to make their purchase. As you plan a website, here are seven steps that will guide you through the process. Feel free to share other tips, examples and best practices related to complex navigation.

Choose Your Website Structure

Many sites lack a sound structure to guide visitors to the information they’re looking for. Having a clear site structure also leads to a better understanding of your site by Google, so it’s incredibly important for your SEO. Bear in mind that you’ll have a few elements common to most pages — such as the navigation menu, and the footer content. If your site is for a business, for example, it’s a good idea to have your contact information available in the footer on each page. If your site is well organized for people, it will probably also be well organized for Google,” Campbell adds. “Google won’t have any way of determining which of these pages are most important.

Shown below is a website page navigation sitemap template with upcoming future pages, dynamic pages as well as pages with external links. All these icons are available in the app, and you can add the next shape you want with a single click using the context toolbar. Listed below are some sitemap templates that will help you start on your website’s sitemap quickly.

It’s like constructing your tower on a granite base instead of quicksand. Depending upon the answer, each page should have strong call to action. If there is no specific goal for this content, does it even belong on your site? Only after this is clearly defined should you roll out a silo-structured website that incorporates targeted calls to action. Site architecture is the manner in which a website’s pages are structured and linked together. A flat website structure means every page on your site is reachable within four clicks of the homepage.

You should control the weight of links on your website, thereby determining their priority. Nancy P. Howard has been working as a journalist at the online magazine in London for a year. She is also a professional writer in such topics as blogging, web design and marketing. One of the best ways to ensure that the user experience of your website is top-notch is by creating a website that functions perfectly. Well, a website that has no issues whatsoever is probably impossible to create, but you can try to make your site as good as possible.

This run-through generates content to rank well in search engine optimization or SEO. Structured data includes tags, JSON code, and rich data which was created for and understood by search engines. Using structured data has been recommended by Google since 2014.

WordPress tags are a non-hierarchical or “flat” grouping mechanism, which means there are no parent/child relationships. This ensures that your site doesn’t have orphan pages, which are when a page is not linked to from anywhere within your site’s structure. Essentially, it cannot be accessed from anywhere within a site and only from a direct link. If you’re unable https://globalcloudteam.com/ to group all of your cluster content within the pillar page’s subdirectory, that doesn’t mean you can’t use this method of website architecture. That would mean all of your cluster content sits on URLs like yourdomain.com/pillar/cluster-page-1/. So let’s take a look at the reasons why you need to take the time to properly define this for these two key reasons…

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