8 Visual Examples to Illustrate Site Structure For Designers
Whether you have created your own site or have found one that is already built, the structure management is a must-do. Without it, your site would look like one large collection of content with no particular direction. For Google to understand what content is most important and helps visitors find their way around the site, a structured site structure will be beneficial to your SEO campaign.
What is website structure?
Your website structure is how the different pages on your website are connected to each other and arranged in order, helping search engines read your context. A good web page structure facilitates easy navigation for both users and crawlers, increasing your SEO ranking.
Benefit of good site structure
Having a clear site structure simplifies the user’s experience, guiding them to access information easily and making your website easier for Google to understand. Search engines use their “understandability” score as a measure of how well they can retrieve your website.
Importance for usability
The experience for your visitors (UX) is dependent on how well your website is organized, which should be based on the needs and desires of your customers. By doing website revamp, your website audience will find it easier to navigate the website and find information about what they are looking for.
To create a strong navigable website, you need to make categories and link content with internal links; to allow new visitors to get instant insight which will make them understand what you are selling or offering.
Importance for SEO
With a solid site structure, your site can get three important benefits
a. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site
The order in which you place links on your site can have a huge impact on the way Google views your website. A good content structure will help search engines find and index relevant content, leading to better rankings in Google.
b. It prevents you from competing with yourself
If you write in a domain where multiple blog posts are relevant, then Google will not be able to differentiate which is the most important. So, think about setting up a structure for linking between your posts. Not only will this make it easier for Google to find you as a source of content, but this will also allow your own individual blog posts to work for you.
c. It deals with changes on your website
Your website content changes over time. To ensure the relevant, quality content is never outdated or deleted by Google, website design companies need to be aware when making changes to the site’s structure.
Ideal site hierarchy
- Home page
- Categories or Service pages or Product pages
- Sub categories (For big websites)
- Individual pages or post
Let’s understand major elements in detail
1. Homepage
When getting started, your homepage is the most vital web page of your website.To help get new visitors up to speed, other important pages should be linked from your homepage. This will assist visitors to discover the information that they are looking for. By linking pages on home page you inform to search engines that these pages are important
Over the course of this article, we’ll make sure that your website is optimized, so that it has a better chance of ranking organically.
To have an accessible homepage, avoid trying to link too many pages from your homepage. This will cause clutter and be disorientating for your visitors.
2. Navigation
Main menu and breadcrumbs are the most important elements of navigation. These should be easy to access. It is vital to have an easy to use menu and breadcrumbs on your site. These are the main navigation tools of your site, with the menu being a main navigation piece and the breadcrumbs being a useful feature that tells users where they are on a page.
a. The menu
Your menu should have all the most important categories and remove as much mystery as possible so it’s easy for your visitors to understand where they are and what they are looking at.
Sometimes, it can be beneficial to include two separate menus on a website in order to better reflect different groups of content. The main menu could be overwhelming and another one, with specific categories and subcategories, would make mousetrapping easier for users
Finally, don’t put too many links on your site menu. With too many points of entry, the value of your website can decrease both for your users and for search engines.
b. Breadcrumb trail
If you are looking for ways to make the site’s structure clearer, you can use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are clickable links that show progress at different parts of a website or blog post. They help visitors understand where they are on your website and how much they have read. They also improve both the user experience as well as your rankings.
3. Taxonomies
WordPress organizes content in the form of categories and tags. These are short for categories and tagging, which is a fancy way of saying that similar websites can be found more easily by people looking for information on the same topic. Categories and tags function as shortcuts that help users find the best articles on their favorite subjects.
a. Categories and subcategories
It is important to divide your blog posts or products into specific categories to make it easy for visitors. With categories that are too big, create smaller subcategories with products of the same type.
Classifying and organizing your content allows users to quickly find the specific parts of your site. By adding main categories on the front page, you can create an effective navigation.
b. Tags
Make sure your site is structured well by adding tags. Notice the difference between a tag and a category. A category will be further divided into subcategories. A tag on the site is much more generic and would just be something like a certain property of an article or product. Think of it as a miniature index in which each article or product has its own entry.
Try not to use too many tags or your blog post will be structurally messy. Once you’ve created two tags for an article, you can no longer create a third one for it. If the tag groups articles together, those are the articles that should be grouped together.
There are times when your theme doesn’t display the tags you’ve entered into the content of your post. That’s okay, though: check where they are located in the article, either in the sidebar or at the bottom. Tags can serve as a gateway to more posts on a similar topic that your visitors might be interested in reading about.
4. Contextual internal linking
Site structure is about grouping and linking content on your site. Contextual links are effective when the page you link to is related to the context. Here is one example: In this paragraph; if you are reading it and are interested in tagging that word, then a click of a link will lead you further into our site’s post about tagging.
Just recall that displaying your most important pages on several other pages of your site is never a good idea because, not only does the target page need to be relevant, but the context of the link should also represent your site.
5. Landing pages
A landing page is a specific webpage, created with the intent of attracting new people to your site, after they’ve looked up specific keywords or phrases or search terms. For your landing pages, you want to make sure the content is informative and leads visitors to the goal of the page so they know they’re moving in the right direction.
Consult creative agencies and determine how they can add uniqueness to your landing page. A top-notch creative agency is necessary to create user-friendly and high-traffic landing pages without too much work.
6. Search intent
For search, when you look up key information, the general framework for what people are searching for is important to keep in mind. This includes a cross-cultural understanding of where audiences may be from and their intended goals in performing searches.
Take the time to consider different categories of search intent and reflect them on your website.
Discover the search phrases that customers are looking out for your products or services. Are they searching for informational terms or they are searching with terms with intention of purchase. Plan the site structure and content accordingly to get best results.
Remember that landing pages should be tested to make sure their content matches the search intent of the audience. It’s important to understand your most important pages and how they can answer different intents.
7. Maintaining your site structure
If you blog a lot or add content on a regular basis, it might seem as though there is never enough time to thoroughly fix your site structure. To prevent this from happening and to keep your website updated, you need to not only create an attention-grabbing structure but have a watchful eye on it while adding blog posts.
8. Avoid keyword cannibalization
The last thing you want is for your site to suffer because you ignore the site structure and don’t add new content regularly. To prevent this, make sure website structure gets fixed while adding new content and keeping an eye on it. This need to be in the checklist of your long-term search engine optimization plan
So stop reinventing the wheel, and start freeing up your time by consulting top SEO companies to take care of everything.
Conclusion
Having a good understanding of how site structure works is essential for any designer. After all, it’s not just about creating pretty pages and making things look easy on the eyes; it’s also about ensuring that your visitors can navigate your site easily and find what they’re looking for.
Author Bio:
Brijesh Jakharia co-founded SPINX Digital in 2005 and takes great pride in crafting web and mobile marketing solutions for mid-market businesses to enterprises. Marketing is his passion, and the thrill to build a brand from the ground up has helped him craft successful brand stories for world-class clients. While not at work, he loves to spend his time on research and reading digital content stories
