An essential task in web design is to improve or create a good Site Structure for SEO.
A good structure makes it easier for visitors to navigate your website. It also makes it easier for search engines to find your most important content.
The Yoast SEO plugin has recently added some new features that help you do that. To help take advantage of the new features, Yoast has published “The Ultimate Guide to Site Structure.”
Here are some key points from Yoast’s article with an example from my own website of its application.
The Importance of Site Structure for SEO
Why is site structure important?
The structure of a website is important because:
- It helps with the customer experience and the usability of the website. If a visitor can use your site well, they are more likely to become a repeat visitor and perhaps customer.
- It helps Google “understand” your website, making it clear what is your most important content and prevents content competing with each other.
An example of structure for SEO
I have a number of pages, articles and blog posts about web design.
www.buildyourwebsite.co.nz/web-design/
The above is my most important article for the phrase “web design”
The URL is the simplest and closest to my home page in structure
www.buildyourwebsite.co.nz/articles/why-pay-for-web-design/
I have a series of important articles and tutorials about web design. The structure includes /articles/, this lets Google know this are informational articles
www.buildyourwebsite.co.nz/category/web-design-articles/
This is the blog category web design
www.buildyourwebsite.co.nz/web-design-articles/2016/content-archives-good-seo-good-web-design/
And an individual post about web design
www.buildyourwebsite.co.nz/our-services/website-redesign/
A page about web design under the Our services. These are services pages.
Key Points for reviewing or creating Site Structure for SEO
- The ideal site structure should be like a pyramid (Learn more from Moz )
- Think carefully about what will be on the main navigation menu on your homepage
- You should use categories for your blog and have similar amounts of posts in each. When a category on your blog becomes too large, divide it into two categories
- Choose your “cornerstone content”, these are articles which are the most important on your website. These are usually more detailed, thorough articles. Do put them under the homepage.
- Internal link structure – Cornerstone articles should have lots of links going back to them, ideally in the same category. So my web design blog posts link back to my main web design article. This also lets Google know what is related content as well as what page is most important. Yoast’s plugin has a link counter which you can use to help.
- You can use tags to group posts together. Remember that a new tag creates a new page so don’t go overboard on creating tags.
- Always do redirects when you make changes to your structure
- Check that the Yoast sitemap is generated and you have submitted it to the Google Search Console
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