SEO – Site Structure

SEO Site Structure for the Win

SEO encompasses the code you use on your site to make it easy to access and load fast. Plus, SEO involves the titles of your articles, pages, and blog posts. SEO site structure is about how you should format your content in terms of the URL, title, H1 and H2 tags. In addition, SEO helps you develop good titles, and write meta descriptions that get results.

Creating Your SEO Site Structure

Your site structure tells Google, and your audience, what parts of your site are most important. The moment someone gets to your website they’re either going to find what they want, or they’re going to leave. The right site structure will improve SEO and usability too.

Plan Site Hierarchy in Advance

It can help people to write out on paper the navigation of their site. The best site structure looks like a triangle, with the smallest part at the top – which is the main menu. After that, everything links out further and further until you get to an individual blog post and content pages, which are going to mostly be discovered via internal linking.

Make Your SEO Site Structure Logical

The linking structure should be logical in nature. The best way to think about this is to try to put yourself in your customer’s mind and start from the beginning. If you looked at your site for the first time, what would you do? Do you know? Fewer top menu items are better than more, but ensure that it makes sense for the audience.

Set Up Main Categories

When you set up your main categories for your blog, it’s important to choose fewer categories rather than more. You don’t want more than three to seven categories. If you feel like you need more, you’re likely going too far outside your niche. Don’t be broad.

Set Up Subcategories for Maximum SEO Site Structure Benefits

You can have a lot more subcategories than main categories. Ensure that they go with the main categories very well so that the linking structure makes sense. For example, if you have a pet store, a good link might look like this:

http://www.yourpetstore.com/cats/breed/mainecoon. This URL makes for a great keyword-rich link to that category.

Choose the Right Anchor Text

Anchor text means that when you click on a word, it goes to a place in your website. Anchor text needs to be clear so that when your audience or search engine notices the link, it makes sense.

There are various types of ways to use anchor text: exact match, partial match, branded, naked link, generic (“click here”), and also images. However, with images it’s best to use text over an image, or an image and text, for the benefit of the search engines.

Keep Important Things Up Front

When setting up the SEO site structure, remember that you want to keep the important things up front. The main menu needs to consist of the things most people are used to seeing. For example, “Home”, “Blog”, “Shop”, “About”, “Contact” and so forth. Then put everything else lower into the wider part of the triangle.

Use Internal Linking for Deeper Content

To make navigation even more effective, it’s important to develop an internal linking strategy. One way to do that is to always link to more relevant content under any content that your audience is reading. If you do it right, you can take them to all the content you want them to read in order, leading them to your sales page to purchase your product or sign up for your email list.

The main thing is to make your navigation simple. It should be easy for your audience to look around, and easy for the search engines to crawl your website. Remember that using anchor text is better than using images when it comes to structure and linking.

I’m author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you are new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my comprehensive training on how to set up Funnels That Click and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.