How To Create A Website Structure

Tips for Designing and Developing Your Website Structure

Before we get into the how-to, it’s important to cover some nuances of design and development.

• Optimize Your Site for People, Not Bots — The gap between website optimization best practices for people and bots has narrowed significantly in recent years. Some website owners are still optimizing for crawl bots, though. While it’s never a bad idea to keep bots in mind, you should always prioritize humans over bots whenever the opportunity arises.
• Keep Links on Any Given Page to a Reasonable Number — It’s crucial to balance on-page time and link interactions. You want users to read the current page of content, but you also want them to go deeper. The key to this balance is keeping links to a reasonable number. What is that number? There’s a long-standing debate in the SEO community on this topic, though a safe number to aim for is three to five links per 1,000 words.
• Utilize Heading Hierarchy — The structure of your website is important, but so is the structure of individual webpages. When you utilize a heading hierarchy, you create a logical structure for your web pages that both humans and bots can understand. A heading hierarchy is the use of heading elements (e.g., H1, H2, H3, H4) to organize on-page content. These elements are easy to implement and organize.
• Keep Navigation Depth Shallow — Whether an online store, an article repository, or a gallery website, your site’s users should be able to find what they need in as few clicks as possible. While there’s no hard-and-fast rule, try to keep the maximum navigation depth to four clicks.
• Show Breadcrumbs — Speaking of navigation, you want to make sure customers effectively navigate backward as well as forward. The best way to do this, particularly on a hierarchical-type website, is with breadcrumbs. Like in Hansel and Gretel, breadcrumbs lead the customers backward on their trail. This enables them to easily back to a higher-level category page and even to the homepage with just a few clicks.
• Keep up on Keyword Research — To produce the best content for your audience, make sure to perform keyword research at all stages of the site structure development process.
• Include Schema Markup — To take your website’s architecture to the next level, consider using structured data. Structured data was created for and understood by search engines. These include tags, JSON code, and rich data. If you’re looking for the most bang, then start with schema markup. You can implement this quite easily compared to JSON, and there are plenty of schema markup guides to get you started.

Guide to build a solid structure

Let’s dive into the process of creating a website structure step by step. 

1. Look at what your competitors are doing

Take a look at your competitors’ websites. Identify who they are and how they’ve built their websites. Look at how they’ve organized information on their site: how many sections they have, how they are connected. It’s a good idea to check the structures of several rivals, evaluating them from the perspective of a user. Besides manual research, you can use parsing and web scraping tools.

2. Collect a website’s keyword list and divide it into groups

• Collect a website keyword list. SE Ranking’s Keyword Research tool will help you collect all relevant search queries: specify the search engine and get the list of suggestions for each keyword with the list of the highest-ranking domains. Note that for a multilingual site, you’ll have to conduct a separate keyword research for each language. You can also use other tools like Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends and visit relevant forums to expand the list of keywords. It’s important to include queries of different search volume to cover both general inquiries and very specific intents.

• Filter the irrelevant keywords. 
• Classify all the rest keywords based on a criterion that works best for you: intent, search volume, difficulty, or another. The Keyword Grouper tool will help you automatically cluster queries based on their similarities in the SERPs. By going through the results, you can match groups of keywords with different sections and pages you plan on having.

3. Categorize all pages

After you’ve collected and filtered all the irrelevant keywords, adjust them to your website’s hierarchy. Write down all major sections and visualize the structure, moving to subsections and specific pages. Use visualization tools like Mindmup and XMind to get a clear picture of the hierarchy: which pages represent the general categories and which ones are more specific, and finally, how they should be connected.

You can also visualize website structure with the help of crawl map tools:

Some of our recommendations on the process of page categorization:

• Regardless of the complexity of your structure, make sure each page can be easily accessed, in no more than 3 clicks from anywhere on the website. 
• Don’t build a hierarchy based on target keyword search volume, as it’s not always the case that the most searched query is your top keyword for a given page.
• Determine all technical pages and think through how they should be indexed: for example, use noindex and nofollow to limit the indexing of website search results, sorting options, and pagination but leave contact pages and policies open to crawlers.
• If you plan on having filtering options, think how those filters will be implemented, especially if combined with each other. 
• Make sure the website is scalable and you will be able to add new categories and subcategories without completely redoing the structure. 

Here’s a list of things to avoid while working on your website structure:

• Lack of clarity in category names. Both users and search engines find it difficult to evaluate a website’s content if the category names are confusing or duplicate each other.
• Lack of classification. If subcategories and filters don’t follow an efficient and logical structure, it can’t be difficult to find a particular page. Be sure to design a balanced structure that is all-inclusive, but not overly detailed that is hard to navigate or requires too many clicks.
• Page duplication. Duplicated or identical content placed on different URLs negatively impacts search rankings. Sometimes, CMS or code issues might lead to the creation of duplicate URLs with dynamic parameters.
• Outdated information. Make sure that all pages are up to date and don’t feature irrelevant information or unavailable products.

4. Maintain a clear URL structure

Create a simple and user-friendly URL structure that follows your website hierarchy. 

Here are some tips on how to keep your URLs clean:

• Use readable words and make the URL as short as possible. 
• Use relevant keywords in your URLs but avoid keyword stuffing (e.g. www.domain.com/keywords-research is better than www.domain.com/buy-the-best-tool-for-keyword-research-and-keyword-suggestion-discounts).
• Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) because search engines perceive the former as a means of word division and the latter as a part of the word (e.g. www.domain.com/keywords-research is better than www.domain.com/keywords_research).
• For a multilingual site, add the hreflang attribute with a language indicator to each URL. 

5. Connect pages with internal linking

The rule of thumb here is that every page should have a link pointing to it and coming from it. 

You can work on internal linking based on page priorities: the more value a page holds for attracting target traffic, the more links should be pointing to that page. Also, make sure your website doesn’t have orphan and dead-end pages that don’t have any links to them or from them. If you have all your URLs written down or visualized before you start categorizing them, you’re likely to have everything under control. 

6. Build simple navigation

Let’s discuss the necessary navigational elements that will help you connect your pages and make users feel at ease using your website.   

• Menu — In many cases, a user’s journey through a website starts from the menu, so it has to feature all important sections. The menu can be placed in the top of the page or on the left, as well be opened by click or by hover. Depending on the site architecture, it can have one or several types of menus. The important thing is that the menu should be easily accessible on both desktop and mobile devices.

• Breadcrumbs — When navigating through your website, users won’t necessarily understand where they are and how they got there. Breadcrumbs will help them find the way back to any section. Not only does this element makes user lives easier but it also helps search bots to understand the site’s hierarchy.

• Header — a website header is a block placed on top of the page that features the most important categories or pages (for example, the Delivery section for e-commerce or the Pricing plans section for SaaS websites). Typically, contacts, a search box, a language or region switch are also included in the header.

• Footer  —  is a block placed on the bottom of the page that might duplicate what is included in the main menu and also features links to Privacy Policy and other documentation, FAQ, contacts, etc. 

• Tags — represent another great way to organize your content and provide users with a specific set of relevant pages.

• Linking blocks — Consider creating recommendation blocks like “See more on the topic,” “You may also like,” “People also viewed.” They will strengthen your internal linking and drive more traffic to relevant pages.  

7. Create a HTML sitemap

Making your site easier to navigate, don’t forget about search crawlers. Sitemaps help them keep track of all pages that appear on your website and index them faster. Search engines can also use the sitemap as a reference when determining canonical URLs. 

You can create an XML sitemap for crawling purposes that will include a list of all URLs and their hierarchy and also an HTML sitemap for users that will act like an interactive list of all pages. Each search engine has its own instructions about creating and submitting a sitemap file. SE Ranking’s Website Audit can ease this process for you and create a sitemap automatically.

8. Test your website

After the launch, you can monitor user behavior with various tools. Heatmaps like Hotjar and Crazy Egg will show how visitors move around the site and where they click, A/B and usability tests will help define which features perform well and which don’t, while real user feedback will give you insightful ideas on what needs improvement.

To check your structure from the technical point of view, use tools like SE Ranking’s Website Audit. It will scan all your pages, identifying all issues with links, tags, indexing directives, and so on. Also, use Google Search Console to monitor how Googlebot sees your pages.