Plan a Website Hierarchy

Developing your site structure is the key to success. It makes sense to define your topic clusters, determine your pillar page for each cluster, and then expand to plan the supporting content. 

Your pillars are the top-level content pages that cover the broader topic. When planning your pillar pages, you should consider how you can cover a wider topic at a broad level within the page. This leaves an opportunity to expand upon the specifics within the relevant cluster.

Think about these as more in-depth pages that answer specific questions about the broader topic. These pages should then link back to the main pillar page—this helps create a solid understanding of how your content is connected.

It helps to visually map out your site’s structure at this stage to help you to see how topic clusters fit together and where specific pages and posts should go.

You can use a free platform like Gloomaps for this.

Once you’ve mapped out your site’s structure, this can make a great reference point as you build out content and continue to grow.

What Should You Plan for Your Website Structure?

So, what exactly should you plan for your website structure? Caleb Fisher, an expert from the custom writing reviews site Best Writers Online, explains it this way, “When planning your website structure, you should focus on several things: main website, blog, and the linking within them.” That’s why you need to think about website structure at three different levels:

Simple Structure: This is the most basic way of picturing your website structure. Think about the main pages and sections of your website and how they will be linked to one another.

Sitemap: This is the file that contains all of the info about the content on your website and how different pieces of it relate to one another. A sitemap is usually used by search engines for crawling.

Advanced Structure: This is a more detailed view of your site structure with the linking between more specific and obscure pages.

Depending on the type of your website, you will want to use one of the three main types of website structure:

• Linear/Sequential Structure: In this type of website structure, pages are connected in a linear manner with every page linking to a page after it. Users usually start with the main page and get to more specific pages by going through pages one after the other. Linear structure is most suitable for smaller websites.

• Network/Web-Linked Structure: This type of structure is quite rare because of its niche focus. Here, each page is linked to all the other pages, so users can access any page while being on any page on the website. If your website is quite small and has a limited number of pages, the network structure will be perfect for it.

• Hierarchical/Tree-Like Structure: By far the most popular type, the hierarchical structure can be used on websites of any size. Users start from the main page and then have the option to get to one of the subsections. Then, they get access to more specific pages from that subsection