Site Structure - All About Website Structure
What is site structure? How a website is structured? What is the reason behind website structure and do we have any standard practices for structuring a website? Let us find out.
All about site structure
A planned Site structure means the proper organization of the content on the website. A site structure is defined by how you have grouped the content on your website. It enhances the user experience and helps Google index your site better.
You can divide the content into categories, including tags, interlinks, navigation must be made easy, and the wise use of breadcrumbs for a better site structure.
Site structure or website architecture suggests how the website is designed. It also refers to how various pages on the website are connected for an excellent user experience (UX).
This is crucial not just from the user’s perspective but also for search engine optimization (SEO).
Different types of site structures
Hierarchical Model: This website model is the most common and preferred type of site structure in use. This model is also known as a tree structure.
Sequential Model: As the name of the model suggests, this permits the users to browse seamlessly sequentially.
Matrix Model: This was quite frequently used in the early years of the internet. It gives the users many relevant links under various topic groups, permitting the users to choose where they want to go next.
Database Model: It is a very dynamic approach to website architecture. With this, a user can create experiences based on his/her search queries.
Importance of website structure
A seamless user experience: If the website is attractive and informative and provides easy access or navigation, users naturally want to spend more time on the site.
This helps the website immensely as it indicates to Google that the website is a great result and needs to be displayed for a search query, which boosts your ranking.
Good site structure can get you site links: Sitelinks on a SERP show a website’s crucial web pages. These provide a great SEO advantage and improve the clickthrough rate drastically, brand’s name is highlighted which helps it to rank better on SERPs.
Improved Crawling: A meticulously designed site structure with great internal linking not only helps the users but also crawlers by permitting them to discover important pages.
Prevent from competing with your website: Sometimes, a website may have different blog posts based on the same topic. If the site is designed perfectly, it can help to avoid competing for web pages and keyword cannibalization.
Steps to design a site structure
Strategize before beginning
Website symmetry
URL structure
URL structure should follow page hierarchy
Pay special attention to the “slug”. A “slug” is the tail end of the URL
“Slug” helps crawlers and users understand the content of the page
Internal linking
Helps connect one webpage to another on the site
Helps good flow of link juice within the domain
W3C validation
Validation process to check the compliance HTML and XHTML documents
It ensures the site works the same in all browsers
Use a suitable JavaScript framework along with HTML and CSS for the best outcome
Use HTML and CSS while developing
Use of suitable Javascript framework
Google Evergreen bot renders 1000 web platforms
You might also want to read other interesting stuff about Websites like – Websit Performance