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Mar 2, 2022
Site structure has a significant impact on both your site’s accessibility and its ability to perform well for Florida SEO terms. That’s because search engines use it to find, crawl, and index content on your site.
A well-structured website also contributes to a positive user experience. According to GoodFirms, one of the main reasons why visitors bounce from a website is due to bad content structure.
If you want to keep visitors on your site longer and boost your ranking on the search engine results pages, it’s important to build an SEO-friendly website structure that both the humans and bots love!
Before we give you tips on how to optimize your site structure for SEO, let’s first discuss what it is, why it's important, and the four main types of site structures used today.
Website structure refers to how you plan and arrange the information on your site. The goal of good structure is to help users navigate your site intuitively and access content seamlessly.
A hierarchical website structure is tree-like. It's commonly used on most websites. They start with a larger, general category page, like the home page, that filters down into more detailed individual pages, like categories, which can further be broken down into sub-categories.
For example, if you’re running an e-commerce website with high-level product categories (e.g., women’s shoes), then normally you will break this down into smaller categories (e.g., boots, flats, heels) that flow down into individual product pages.
A hierarchical structure is ideal if you have a large amount of data.
A sequential or linear website structure leads visitors through a sequence. They follow a simple page-to-page path, which leads users backward or forward. They can’t lead visitors across to another general category page from a sub-category page.
This type of structure is suitable for you if you only have a few pages you want to display or if you want to present your content in chronological order.
For example, if you offer online courses, then it would be smart to use a sequential website to ensure that users go through each step and make the entire process as simple as possible.
The matrix model was quite popular in the early years of the internet. This website structure gives users the freedom to choose where they would like to go next by providing many links under topic groups on the page they land on.
A good example of this is Wikipedia.
If you have large amounts of data to present, a matrix model could work well for you.
The database model uses a bottom-up approach, which makes it one of the most complex types of website structures.
It's popular because it’s user-friendly, allowing people to find what they’re looking for right away.
That said, it requires the expertise of an experienced website programmer to ensure that you can create a searchable database that users can easily access.
When planning your website structure, think about how users navigate through the site and what you can do to improve their experience.
Many website owners still optimize their structure for bots instead of people. While this is not entirely a bad idea, bear in mind that the reason why you’re optimizing your website structure for SEO in Florida is that you want to delight and convert more visitors.
When you succeed in doing this, rankings will naturally follow.
A positive user experience keeps people on your site longer, which reduces your bounce rate and attracts more traffic. On the other hand, a site layout that’s too confusing forces visitors to leave right away, increasing your bounce rate and bringing your rankings down.
Internal linking connects your pages and allows users to navigate through your website seamlessly.
When linking your site, remember that it should only take a maximum of three clicks from your homepage to get to a subpage. Otherwise, it will be difficult for users and search engine bots to get the information they want to reach.
This can leave visitors frustrated, leading to a bad user experience.
Moreover, if it takes forever before crawlers can reach pages buried too deep in your site, they’ll end up not crawling them at all.
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A heading hierarchy refers to the relationship between main headings and subheadings.
It’s how you organize on-page content. By using heading elements like H1, H2, H3, and H4, appropriately, you can improve the readability and scannability of your pages.
If you want to have an SEO-friendly website structure, start by identifying which high-volume keyword you want to rank for and create a dedicated page that provides a comprehensive overview of that topic. Then, publish content that supports and links back to that page.
Having a collection of interlinked articles and web pages pointing back to a page pillar helps convey both authority and relevance to Google.
Make sure that you link between pages on your website discussing the same topic. This will strengthen your SEO in Florida and help bots understand your site layout.
A good example of this is linking your product pages and other related posts to your high-traffic blog posts. Doing this will help crawlers and users better navigate your site.
Breadcrumbs serve as signage, telling users their whereabouts within a website’s structure. They inform users about their current location and where else they could go from there.
What’s great about using breadcrumbs as your secondary navigation is that users don’t need to look at the menu to find other navigation options. As a result, users are more likely to browse across your pages, reducing your bounce rate.
Breadcrumbs make it a lot easier for both mobile and desktop users to navigate back to your home page or other main pages in just a few clicks.
If you have a lot of content organized in a hierarchical structure with multiple sections, then it would be smart to use breadcrumbs. However, if you're running a personal blog or single-level website, then a secondary navigation system isn't necessary.
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is the official language of search engines.
Adding schema markup to your site will help search engine bots clearly understand your content, boost your click-through rates, and improve your visibility by 400%. In fact, Google has been recommending it since 2014.
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To create a website structure that both bots and human users will love, you must consider your ideal customer's search intent when categorizing or grouping products together.
For example, if you sell perfumes, you want to make sure that your target customers see them by optimizing your product pages for as many keywords as you can. Think about using top-line categories like "Shop by Occasion," which will then have subpages that are more targeted: "Perfumes for Her" or "Perfumes for Mothers".
Organizing your website this way helps you match your ideal customers’ search intent.
A website that’s easy to navigate delights both bots and human users. So, make it a point to structure your website well, optimize for SEO Florida, and put your ideal customers in mind when designing it.
If you need help organizing your website and its content in a way that makes sense to both search engines and people, Digital Resource is here for you.
Our team of web developers and website designers will work with you to make sure that your website has an effective website structure that drives traffic and conversions!
Fill out this form if you’re curious about how well your current website structure is performing in terms of providing an excellent user experience and SEO.
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