What Is Site Structure?

Website architecture is the hierarchical structure of your website pages. This structure is reflected through internal linking. Your website’s structure should help users easily find information and help search engine crawlers understand the relationship between different pages.

What is the importance of Website structure?

• A smooth user experience

If your website is appealing and informative and has hassle-free navigation, users will want to spend more time on it, increasing the dwell-time and decreasing the bounce time. This will, in turn, indicates to Google that your website is an excellent result to be displayed for a search query and can boost your rankings.

• Good site structure can get you sitelinks

Sitelinks on a SERP show your website’s important pages. These are of a great SEO advantage and can improve clickthrough rate, better your brand’s reputation and help you rank better on SERPs. Google awards sitelinks to websites with excellent site structure. Currently, you cannot add a sitelink on your own.

• Improved Crawling 

A properly designed website structure with good internal linking will help not only users but also crawlers that crawl your website by letting them discover important pages.

• Prevents from competing with your website

Sometimes, you may have different blog posts written around the same topic. If your site is designed correctly, it can help you avoid having competing webpages and keyword cannibalization.

• It helps you keep your website organised

Over time, your site will grow. You may be blogging regularly or adding more product pages or case studies, and if you don’t have a good site structure in place, things could start getting messy. When you start with a sensible structure, everything will have its place and it will be easy for you as the site owner to place or categorise pages, and for users and bots to find them.

What are the types of website structure?

• Hierarchical — sometimes referred to as a tree structure, is the most popular website structure. It moves from larger, more general category pages into smaller, individual pages. An example of this is websites with high-level product categories (e.g., shirts) that flow into smaller categories (e.g., t-shirts, blouses, knits) that flow into individual product pages. The hierarchical structure is a great option for websites with large amounts of data. It’s best for websites with obvious categorical breakdowns (e.g., e-commerce).

• Sequential — A linear, or sequential structure is a logical website structure following a simple page-to-page path. The best use of this structure is if you have a large amount of content that you need to deliver in chronological order. For example, an online course or a sales funnel. A sequential website structure will ensure users go through the steps as you intended without the ability to navigate out of order.

• Database — is one of the most complex website structure types. It’s built using a bottom-up approach. This requires special attention to tagging and metadata so as to build up a searchable database for users to access. An example of a database structure is Medium:

One of the pros of the database structure type is it can be personalized to meet your needs. Since it’s bottom-up, it can also be built up over time. As your website grows, the previous database files become part of their own dataset under the newer, larger structure. The con to this is a database structure requires extensive programming knowledge.

• Matrix — matrix structure is one of the oldest structure types on the internet. It’s a complex, non-traditional structure best navigated using search and internal links. Wikipedia is a prime example of a matrix structure. There are seemingly endless possibilities for where the user can go next. The obvious use for this structure type is a wiki-style website. It enables you to present large amounts of data in a word cloud-like format. You don’t need to concern yourself with parent-child relationships or navigation.

Website architecture best practices

• Create a simple top-level navigation menu.
• Keep your URLs simple and user-friendly.
• Model your website architecture after the top players in your industry.
• Keep your website consistent.
• Implement the pillar-cluster internal linking model.
• Provide access to most of your website’s pages in 3-4 clicks.
• Use breadcrumbs.
• Create an HTML and XML sitemap.