All websites have some form of structure, whether a streamlined one or one that is disorganized with a mere jumble of pages.
However, it has been found that search engines like Google place great emphasis on this site structure element and the better your site structure, the greater your chance of achieving a higher ranking in search results.
If you then want to build a site that is loved by search engines and ranked high in search engine results, with more assured traffic coming to your site, incorporate a site structure that is of high quality.
A website’s site structure refers to how your website is set up and how the individual subpages are linked to one another. This will help search engines understand what the topic of your site is and enable crawlers to find all subpages quickly.
Differs From Website Design Website design is used to describe the design process relating to the front- end design of a website. Site structure, on the other hand, does not go after the physical appearance of a website, but considers how the individual pages are linked together to facilitate easier navigation Let us go through some of the major elements that define the quality of a site structure. Site Crawlability Site crawlability is one of the major factors that decide the quality of a site structure and is given weightage in ranking algorithms. Crawlability refers to a search engine’s ability to crawl through your text content to figure out what your website is all about. This will entail navigating through sub pages and individual topics to understand the website as a whole. As search engine robots do the site crawling, an important tenet of good website crawlability is that there are no dead ends while crawling. In addition, the best way to assure easy site crawlability is to include internal links on every page, which creates a bridge from one part to another. Easy Navigation & Internal Links The internal links should be such that it provides easy navigation to users without any difficulties and search engines view favorably all sites that offer good internal linking facilities. Usability experts suggest that it should take only three clicks to find any given page even if your website is large and has several pages. This internal linking process helps search engines find other pages through keyword – rich anchors and decreases the page depth. It also provides for easier access to all the other content displayed in the site. User Experience A good user experience is vital to the commercial success of a website. If the site makes people confused and users are put at a loss as to the next step to be taken, it surely is a poor user experience and no one will stay on such a site. A bad user experience can have a negative impact on your site rankings and search engines will penalize sites that offer users a very bad experience. A poor and negative experience will make search engines realize that the site is not the most relevant or useful for that query and the SERP delivered by the search engines will reflect that. Duplicate Pages Existence of duplicate content in a site could adversely affect its SERP and search engines penalize sites that contain duplicate content. Duplicate content is content where two or more sites display same content or where a site displays same content in several of its pages. Always avoid having duplicate content on sites as only sites with original content only are shown in top place in search results.