Your website structure is important - Don't ignore the SEO and user experience benefits!

Cristian Level X³

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June 29, 2017, 5:32 am

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Your website structure is important - Don't ignore the SEO and user experience benefits!

How much importance do you put on your website's structure? How well did you plan everything with the designer, coder, and SEO when you first started working on your website?

If you didn't put an effort into having an optimized website structure you might have a problem! 

I recently got a new client that had a rather serious problem: he couldn't fully index his website in Google. Nothing was wrong with the site itself, decent design, decent enough content, nothing blocked in robots.txt and no pages flagged with the no-index tag, but still, the majority of pages weren't index by Google. 

Why? Because it took me over 5 clicks to reach one specific product page and to top it all of the websites had all sorts of redirects in place plus it was a multi-language website but he decided to use folders instead of subdomains. Anyways the URL structure of one product looked like this: website.com/en/products/category/subcategory/product-name - I'm guessing the Google crawler stopped somewhere in the subcategory listing page. Why? Because a crawler will go through a limited session of redirects and a limited number of website levels before it quits and stops crawling.

I fixed everything by redesigning the website's structure and by removing useless redirects. After this implementation, the website got fully index with all of its products in a few hours time. 

This is a valuable lesson to everything that owns a website. Having a simple, clearly defined structure is essential both for search engine but also for users! 
This is my rule: For a website structure to be optimal, you need to be able to get anywhere on the website within three to four clicks. If it takes more than this, I may want to rethink the website's structure. 

So, let's put this into perspective, for an optimal website structure you need to:

• Think of the users and how exactly you are helping them, they need to understand the content tight away and be able to navigate your website without any issues or special instructions. 
• Every page should be at a three clicks distance, four at the most. 
• Search Engine crawlers may give up crawling on websites that have 4 or more levels
• Don't ignore the number of redirects a crawler needs to do if it finds a series of redirects it will give up pretty fast in crawling the website. 
• It generally needs to make sense in the simple way of thinking. 
• Don't forget about sitemaps, the sitemap needs to fully present the exact structure of the websites, without any errors or dead ends. Test your sitemap in Google search Console and also review it manually and make sure everything is right from a hierarchical point of view. 

Comments

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keen2write

keen2write

Great quality post mate, also proofreading and other grammar helps your site as well. Can I just mention as well Google Chrome has a new extension its BRILLIANT? it allows members to check their grammar while they are actually typing posts even when your writing on here. I am going to post a discussion about it as it is helping my websites out. It's a great new extension it also allows you to use on any websites to check either spelling or grammar mistakes and more. It is called Grammarly for Chrome.

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alornishan1

alornishan1

Yes, i also think so. Structure of a website is important. It creates impression on the visitors. If the site is designed badly, then it creates bad impression. Thanks for your post.

0 7 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

Yes, your site should have well-built structure, everything should be found easily. In order to give your website proper structure, you will have to create header menu. Your menu should contain your category as well as pages. Your menu should also include about us and contact us section. If everything you want cannot be accommodated, you can use drop down feature.

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Corzhens

Corzhens

I know that the structure of the website is very important because it is like the architecture of a house that you have built. If the architecture is bad then that will stay in the long run and hurt your operation. That’s why when you build a house, you consult an architect just to be sure of the sound architectural design. In a website, that’s also the case that’s why I would prefer to have a designer create my website than doing the hard work myself and fall into traps and mistakes. At least the designer already knows all that.

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