Why Good Site Structure is Important for SEO

Shoddy website structuring is a common detracting factor when it comes to SEO strategies, no matter how inclusive the latter happen to be. Google typically takes better to sites where it does not have to rummage too long to find the most important pages. Luckily, it is possible to make this fact work in your favour on the long run, through actionable changes in your current strategy that uphold site-wide structuring as a priority.

What Exactly is Site Structure?

The term basically refers to the way your website’s content is organized. There may be an assortment of topics discussed on it, which are presented in a specific way on different pages and in various posts. The grouping, linking and presentation of all that content are important where a visitor is concerned. Ensuring these things remain optimal makes it easier for people to navigate within the site, consequently letting Google index pages more quickly. This is an approach included in many of the best SEO packages.

While taxonomies (categories, tags, etc.) help in much the same way, underestimating the importance of internal links can hamstring your SEO rewards to a great extent. Without proper structuring, you end up having clutter that lets trivial posts bury the important ones, as well as product pages. A visitor would normally expect to find the latter easily, and when they cannot, they tend to move on to another website, which is friendlier in terms of content arrangement.

The Importance of Good Site Structure

• It guides Google through your site: The search engine picks up clues from your site structure, about where the most vital content is located. This means Google understands how your product can be affected. The service’s bots follow both internal and external links while crawling websites, and in this way, Google decides how different pages relate to others.
• It prevents you from competing with yourself: An own goal becomes a definite possibility whenever you neglect to structure your website at least half decently. You may have multiple posts on a single topic the way many blogs and product sites do. However, heaps of disordered content can stop Google from recognizing that each post handles a different aspect of the same subject. This effectively pits it against the others, and causes it to score a lower rank. A superior internal linking structure tells Google which pages you think are important, so that these get the most attention of the lot. You see this as a common aim among some of the best SEO services India has to offer.

• It enhances UX: good site structure helps your website attain high rank in Google results, sure. However, there is also the matter of it boosting the user-friendliness of your site. Navigation becomes a lot easier for the first-time visitor, which almost ensures higher conversion rates. People also tend to return, as well as sign up for newsletters when they see your site is helpful. All this further secures your place in Google’s good books.

What you Need to Do

• Take out the old content: It is bad form to have old content showing up among the new, unless the former has managed to stay relevant to date. In the likelier case that it has not, it is best to remove it in order to avoid the aforementioned clutter. Before doing that though, check if there are links those post which you can still benefit from. If there are, you will need a way to keep capitalizing on them even when the page is long gone. For most publishers, simply redirecting the URL works wonders.
• Check your categories: All categories need to be of roughly the same size. Imagine each as a pile, and consider what happens when some piles towered over the rest: the former becomes much harder to search through. Each time a visitor gives up trying and goes away, you would be denied a tiny bit of the benefit from publishing all that content, because it is a sign that Google would take longer to find the important posts in that stack. So, make sure to write roughly equal numbers of posts under every category, and do not let any grow to more than twice the size of another.
• Improve the internal linking structure: Make it a point to link to the content that you consider most important. Do this on a regular basis, and make sure the articles you link to are of the best quality. Google grabs on to such internal linking pathways and rapidly indexes the content it finds that way. Meanwhile, users too get drawn to your best posts, with the process helping both them and you.

Site structure, like much of SEO, figures into a much larger, ongoing process. This means it is not a one-off thing; as your site keeps growing, you will need to do the above things repeatedly. Improvement and maintenance of this and other kinds are the key to ensuring your SEO strategy works well.