Whether you are interested in designing a new website or optimizing and redesigning an existing one, focusing on SEO-friendly website architecture should be your priority.
Why? Well, SEO-friendly website architecture is inevitable for achieving a higher ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). Furthermore, an ideal website structure created by experts at digital marketing agency can assist both the search engine crawlers and digital users easily find what they are looking for on your website.
However, creating a successful SEO-friendly site architecture is easily said than done. You’ll need to follow a few steps. For instance, you may require comprehending SEO basics, analysing your existing website structure and then creating a site map. Also, optimizing headers, URLs, and titles and implementing responsive design for mobile users are crucial aspects, too.
Hence, most site owners turn to SEO consulting agencies for expert guidance and services.
But irrespective of which route you take – whether you hire an expert or consider doing everything in-house, it is crucial you know the basics. With this blog, we aim to do just that. Stick around to gain details on how to create an SEO-friendly website architecture in 2023.
1- Website architecture – the basics
Also referred to as site structure, website architecture is a way of arranging information on a site. It focuses on arranging the contents in a way that users don’t require spending time looking for them.
Site architecture also deals with how different pages get linked with each other and how the content on them gets displayed to deliver the optimal user experience.
When creating a website architecture, always remember that –
- A sound site structure caters to both the machine and people.
- A well-planned and designed site structure makes browsing intuitive.
2- Why does sound website architecture matters at all?
A good site structure or website design is crucial because it allows users to easily scan through the ever-growing amounts of information available on the internet.
Apart from your users, site structure is important for search engine bots, too. It assists the bots in surfacing the content of your website wherever it is relevant.
By choosing to create a logical and consistent site architecture, you can –
- Achieve the objectives you might have for a certain page on your site, or
- Deliver excellent user experience to those visiting or using your site.
3- What makes a site’s architecture good or bad?
Good site architecture is intuitive, meaning it doesn’t stress the users to think too much while using the site. Plus, a sound website architecture makes the crawlers easily read and index your site.
A bad website, on the other hand, is non-intuitive. This means such websites are hard to use, navigate and obtain information from. Both bots and humans end up getting lost in the poorly organized content of such sites.
Creating a good site architecture requires you to think out of the box. In fact, there are a few catches that experts at Kelowna web design firms adhere to –
- There are multiple ways of organizing content on a site.
- Not every user has the same needs.
- Every user has a different perspective on what goes together and what doesn’t.
- Not every user may know everything about a topic. Also, there will be people who may know a lot about the same topic. Hence, considering both perspectives is important, too.
- The techs people employ for using the internet and accessing your site keep evolving.
- Also, search engines that arrange most of the data changes on a regular basis, too.
4- Best practices for producing a technically sound website architecture in 2023 –
Are you ready to plan your site’s structure? Listed below is a guideline that established Kelowna web design company adhere to.
4.1- Employ the “Flat” site architecture
When designing a website, always aim to create a site that offers access to content in just a few clicks (ideally, four or fewer). Whether you own a small website that has a handful of pages or a large ecommerce site with millions of pages, content accessibility should be short and sweet.
This is because the depth of the architecture plays a key role in how your site gets crawled by the bots. Since search engines navigate a site using links. The lower the crawl depth is, the quicker and easier it will be for the crawlers to navigate the webpage.
There are multiple tools available in the market that allows you to easily audit the site to determine which pages take more than three clicks to access on your site. If you come across any site that takes more than necessary clicks to visit, work with a website design company to simplify the same.
4.2- Keep everything simple
Although this tip isn’t necessary if you own a blog site or a website with hundreds of pages. However, once you start adding hundreds and thousands of pages to your site, simplicity becomes inevitable.
Adding pages can usually make the site’s architecture super complicated. Not only will that hurt your SEO, but it will result in a bad user experience, too.
Imagine the likeliness of finding the right page in just a few seconds when the site’s architecture is nothing but complicated. And given customers lack patience, complications will only increase the bounce rate.
Web design Victoria with complicated architecture, start off messy and become messier when more pages, categories and subdomain get added. Everything ends up in a tangled mess.
In comparison, when a site’s architecture is super simple, it becomes easy for customers to navigate through the site and find the information they are seeking in a few minutes.
And this is exactly why you must work with your hired website design company Canada and focus on establishing a website hierarchy from the very beginning. And ensure that you stick to it as time goes by.
4.3- Utilize category pages
Category pages are crucial, given they assist in organizing site architecture quite easily down the line.
Do you wish to roll out a new page? Consider adding it to an existing category. You can add a link to it from your category page.
Do you wish to create a couple of new pages? Create a new category. Use this category link and add it to the newly created pages.
When you don’t have a category, you end up adding pages randomly. And this is what complicated the website’s architecture.
If you run a relatively small website that has pages less than 1000 on it, organizing things based on category may not be at all important. Also, when it comes to blogs, most of them may be interlinked with one another. In such cases, category pages may not be required either.
However, when there are tons of pages involved. For instance, if you own an ecommerce store, the category should be the first thought on your mind when creating an ecommerce website design.
4.4- Develop an easy-to-follow navigation menu
An easy way of connecting pages and reinforcing site structure is by using the navigational menu. This is because menus work as a collection of related links.
There are several different types of navigational menus that can select from. Also, there is no right way of structuring the menu. However, it is best if you maintain the site easily for navigation purposes. This way, you can allow the customers to find crucial pages and do what you wish them to do on your site (perhaps purchase, subscribe to your newsletter, etc.)
4.1- One of the most widespread types of navigation menus is the horizontal navigation bar that appears at the top of the site. It is a straightforward choice and works best for almost all types of sites.
If you have too many options to include in your horizontal navigation bar, consider adding the drop-down navigation structure. They work excellently well for sites that have a lot of content and a complicated site architecture. A drop-down list can allow you to declutter the important pages and still offer a straightforward path to the users.
4.2- Yet another choice of the navigation bar is the vertical sidebar. Although similar to a horizontal navigation bar, a vertical sidebar appears on the side of the site. The vertical sidebar can offer more real estate if you have top-tier navigation links.
Perhaps you own a small website and wish to add all the pages in the navigation; a vertical menu will help you in doing just that.
Besides, you gain the freedom of incorporating other information on the top of the page, including contact details, appointment links, social media information, etc.
4.3- Do you wish to design a navigation bar for a mobile site? Consider focusing on Hamburger navigation. On larger screens, hamburger navigation appears horizontally when collapsed and vertically on smaller screens of mobile phones.
Users are required to click on the three horizontal lines (icon) on the top of their screen to see the navigation links. This menu ends up saving huge amounts of space.
4.4- The last option for the navigation menu is the footer navigation. They appear at the bottom of the site and are typically added to almost all types of sites.
Most typically, footer navigation is paired with a horizontal navigation bar. They can be used for adding links that did not make it to the main navigation. This way, you can prevent cluttering of the web design Kelowna while still providing vital information to the users.
4.5- Optimize the site URLs
When we say optimize your site URLs, we clearly mean keeping the URLs short and in relation to the content on the page. Perhaps use the target keyword.
It is crucial to keep the URLs consistent and clear because search engines employ them to comprehend the structure and hierarchy of your site.
In fact, Google recommends site owners use simple URLs that aren’t intimidating.
Avoid – Https://www.XYZ.com/folder2/file2/newimage1.html.
Instead, use – Https://www.XYZ.com/blogs/Top-tips-for-building-SEO-strategties.html.
CMSs usually generate URLs automatically on the basis of your page H1 and the parent page’s category you’ve chosen. This may not always be ideal. And thankfully, CMS allows people to alter the URL before it is published.
Before you decide to publish the URL, ensure that it is both clear and concise and explains the content of the landing page.
4.6- Focus on the breadcrumb navigation
You can also integrate your website with breadcrumb navigation, thereby allowing the users to know exactly where they are on the site.
Breadcrumb navigation is a text-based navigation path that features links.
Using breadcrumb navigation could be beneficial because not everyone that clicks through your site will navigate directly to the product and buy it. He or she may want to go back to the previous menu to check something else. Breadcrumb navigation shows the navigation path, thereby allowing the users to easily backtrack.
You can even add a breadcrumb structured data markup to your page. This way, the breadcrumb path may show up on the SERPs.
4.7- Employ XML and HTML sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that displays the images, pages, files and videos on your site. It demonstrates how your site’s different paths are linked to one another in a crawlable format for search engine bots.
An HTML sitemap is typically designed for users, allowing them to find a particular page if they aren’t able to by viewing the full list of web pages available on your website.
An XML sitemap is created for the search engines. This sitemap shows the entire list of URLs in plain text, enabling the crawlers to access them easily.
Always ensure to address any issues with the sitemap, especially the XML sitemap. This is because search engines tend to ignore pages when they aren’t able to process or find a certain webpage. This could hurt your rankings.
Work with your Kelowna web design agency to submit your XML sitemap to Google using Google Search Console as quickly as you can, informing Google about the site’s architecture.
Our parting thoughts
Well, evidently, developing an SEO-friendly website design requires quite a lot of work. But unfortunately, there is no other way out. If you want to make your site easily accessible by both search engine crawlers and digital users, employing the practices listed above is inevitable.
Thankfully, there is an easier way out of this situation. And that is by hiring a web design company in Victoria like SEO Resellers Canada.
We have the right expertise, tools and skills required to customize website design Canada that resonates with your industry niche without hampering the essence – SEO-friendly site architecture.
