SEO Fundamentals: How to Build Your Website Structure
There is no doubt about it – if you want to build a successful business, you will need to build a successful website first. Constructing a website is similar to constructing a house – if the foundation isn’t perfect, everything else can come crumbling down quickly. To build an effective website, you will need to place a large amount of focus on SEO structure. By focusing on SEO, you can ensure your website is found and ranks high among search engine results.
The Importance of Website Structure
Building an SEO-friendly website may seem easier said than done, but it can be done. By creating a search engine optimized website, you can help your business expand and thrive like never before.
Search Engines
It is true – you should always design your website with potential visitors in mind, but you should also keep search engines in mind. If search engine bots can’t efficiently navigate your website, you probably won’t have too many visitors to worry about. Simply put, the more search engine-friendly your website is, the more likely it will be found by potential visitors when they utilize sites such as Google to look for businesses similar to yours. Most people rarely visit the second page of Google search results, so you must design a website with a structure that communicates important information to bots.
User Experience
Anyone who visits your website should have a seamless and pleasurable experience. Websites are built for real people, and proper websites ensure that visitors can find everything they need and navigate through the website in just a few clicks. You don’t want to complicate things and scare off visitors to your website by greeting them with a difficult-to-use, outdated website. When designing your website, remember that users will utilize its navigation to reach information about the product or service they are looking for. Creating a site that offers a wonderful user experience can easily generate more business for your company.
Future Growth
Keep future growth in mind as well when designing your website. As time progresses, you will surely want to add more blogs, additional services, and new products, so you will want to make sure you can do so with no problem. An effective website structure will help you do so with little to no limitations.
Creating a Website With the Proper SEO Structure
Now that you understand how important SEO structure is to your website, you will probably want to know how you can build an exceptional site that attracts visitors who are interested in your goods or services.
Plan Ahead
To construct the right type of website for your business, you must take your site’s content into consideration. Blog posts, services, products – write down everything you have planned for the short and long-term. When preparing your content plan, think about the following:
- Will you need a section where you teach site visitors how to utilize your product? Will this section need to be separate from your blog? If you answered yes to both of the previous questions, consider putting this part of the site under a “learn” section.
- Considering placing your content marketing under a different URL if your entire site is focused on a product or SaaS.
- If you are creating a content-based site focused on a specific topic, you may not need a sub-URL or blog.
In short, it can be helpful to think about all the potential areas where you want your site to expand.
Create a Site Structure
After you come up with a content plan, you will want to draft the overall structure of your site. This will help you visualize how you want your site to look and ensure you don’t forget anything important. You don’t need to worry about a “virtual” structure for now – just outline the actual order you want your content in.
You must also find a balance between “too deep” or “too wide” when designing your page structure. In other words, you want to avoid having a massive list of “parent” pages while at the same time avoiding an enormous list of sub-child and sub-sub-child pages. It is acceptable if one or two child pages exhibit a sub-category, but you don’t want too many. An optimal solution is to simply keep your website’s structure at the parent/child page level.
Build Internal Links
Internal links are an immensely important aspect of SEO. Often considered a vote of confidence from other websites, you will want to make sure your site has an adequate number of internal links to authoritative sites. Search engines will notice this and rank your website higher.
Perform Keyword Research
Keywords are also important, primarily because they can help search engines locate your site. Take the time to adequately research your keywords, and once you do this, you can make adjustments to the structure of your website. There are numerous tools you can use to research the quality of your keywords – take advantage of them.
Contact Us
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