Content
Outline your marketing strategy in a simple, coherent plan. Pages will hold all your beautifully written content, videos, and images. They are all about hierarchy — you need to tell the reader where to look first and where to look after that. The title should be an H1, or the biggest text element on the page. Your subtitles should be H2, the subtitles of those sections H3, and so forth.
It will scan all your pages, identifying all issues with links, tags, indexing directives, and so on. Also, use Google Search Console to monitor how Googlebot sees your pages. Making your site easier to navigate, don’t forget about search crawlers. Sitemaps help them keep track of all pages that appear on your website and index them faster. Search engines can also use the sitemap as a reference when determining canonical URLs. Tags represent another great way to organize your content and provide users with a specific set of relevant pages.
How to set up the structure of your site
This almost feels like a lack of structure but that’s the point, it makes it easy for users to have an experience that suits whatever their needs are even if they change mid-process. It doesn’t take much effort to get a few clicks deep, change your mind, and decide to go another direction. Calling it freeform would be a bit far but this https://globalcloudteam.com/ is a more relaxed way of navigating. This type of website structure can be found in sites such as small businesses that have a small number of pages — things without subcategories or child pages. They take a visitor through a predefined sequence in other words. This type of menu is usually paired with horizontal navigation bars.
By default, it will always show the post or page title as the end of the URL , which you can easily modify in the Post Editor under URL. Breadcrumbs are a great way for that , and also be sure to make your site logo link back to your homepage. In addition, make sure that what you include in your menu delivers what it promises. Clearly how to plan a website structure label everything, and when users click on something, make sure they land on the page they expect. If you have a very large website, it often makes sense to further divide your categories into subcategories. For example, as an online shop, merely having a product category named “pants” is probably not going to be too helpful.
Create an XML Sitemap
If your web site is actively growing, the proper balance of menus and content pages is a moving target. Feedback from users can help you decide if your menu scheme has outlived its usefulness or has weak areas. Complex document structures require deeper menu hierarchies, but users should never be forced into page after page of menus if direct access is possible. With a well-balanced, functional hierarchy you can offer users menus that provide quick access to information and reflect the organization of your site. If you want to create a website, it’s just the right time to plan the site structure to achieve the best SEO.
- Anticipating where site visitors want to go improves navigation and builds a stronger network of links throughout a website.
- The received information will allow you to develop the most efficient content plan for each target group.
- Planning the website structure is a very time-consuming process.
- There are also standalone plugins like XML Sitemaps that you can use for this purpose.
- It is how the information on your site is organized and presented so that the algorithm can read its context well.
The hierarchy for many ecommerce websites, for example, becomes more specific from the top page down. You’ll find increasingly specific products as you move down the hierarchy. A clothing store, for example, likely has several categories, each with unique subcategories. The role of a designer is to create a website that has a great UX that takes care of accessibility and is easy to use. A great website structure improves the usability or user-friendliness of your website by making it easy for users to find what they are looking for. To create a website structure, you need to map out how you will organize the content on your site .
Identify your structure
Linear-style sites are a simple website structure, and sometimes that basic website structure is just what the doctor ordered. Not every site will be as straightforward and able to use this type, but sites with fewer pages can benefit from this low-maintenance option. There are several types and subcategories of structure out there, but we’re going to focus on the four that you’ll most often see used in the wild. While this type of navigation appears horizontally on larger screens, it appears vertically on mobile.
Therefore, if you already have one of them on your site, you are covered. There are also standalone plugins like XML Sitemaps that you can use for this purpose. Luckily, WordPress creates user-friendly URLs out of the box.
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Encloses a block of related content that makes sense on its own without the rest of the page (e.g., a single blog post). The simple example shown above isn’t pretty, but it is perfectly fine for illustrating a typical website layout example. Some websites have more columns, some are a lot more complex, but you get the idea.
Click on any errors you may find to get more details about how you can improve your site. For example, here is a list of sitemap pages with formatting errors, as identified by the tool. So if they can’t find a certain page, they can view a full list of every page on your site. These URLs are optimized for user experience and SEO purposes. And the cluster page’s URL shows the relationship between the pillar topic and subtopic.
Navigation
You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you, instead of against you. The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. It helps search engines understand what your site mainly is about or what you’re selling. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly. A good structure should, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.
