How to structure your website for higher rankings on search engines

A solid website structure helps search engines to understand your website content. The easier it is to find out what your web pages are about, the more likely it is that your web pages will get high rankings.

A well organized website helps your users to find what they are looking for, and it helps search engines to understand the purpose of your website.

website structure

Flat websites vs. deep websites

The two most common website navigation structures are flat sites and deep sites. Flat websites are websites that try to make each web page available with very few clicks. Deep websites are websites that use long paths to access specific pages on the site.

A deep website structure enables you to create very exact and targeted topical pages on your website. The disadvantage of a deep website structure is that website visitors and search engine crawlers take longer to find the content they are looking for.

A flat website structure makes it easier for website visitors and search engines to find all pages of your website. The fewer pages your visitors have to go through before finding the content they are looking for, the better.

The best structure for your website

Help your website visitors and search engine bots to get maximum results. All pages on your website should be accessible with a maximum of four clicks from the home page of your site.

In addition, the navigational elements on your website reflect the importance of the linked pages. It usually makes sense to create your website structure like this:

  • Create an overview of all pages of your website.
  • Break the content into core categories and create a top level navigation that hold the different content types of your site.
  • Create logical sub categories.
  • If necessary, create another sub category level.
  • Link the targeted pages from the sub category pages.

If you think about creating a public sitemap of your website so that your visitors can find all pages then your website navigation is not good enough.

Although a sitemap can help search engines and website visitors to find pages on your site, the regular navigation of your website should be so good that a sitemap is not needed.

Check your website now

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler can help you to get the number of clicks that are necessary to reach individual pages on your website (‘click depth’).

check the click depth

In addition, the website audit tool checks many more things that influence the position of your web pages on Google and other search engines. If you haven’t done it yet, try SEOprofiler now:

Try SEOprofiler now

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.