SEO Structure Strategy
Your in-house SEO structure can make or break the success of the strategic implementations for your website.
What is Site Structure?
Site structure refers to how you organize your website’s content. A website often consists of content on a variety of – related – topics, presented on posts and pages. Site structure deals with how this content is grouped, linked and presented to the visitor. If you structure your website well, it will benefit from this; users will find their way more easily and Google can index your URLs better. Taxonomies, like categories and tags, but also internal links, your navigation and breadcrumbs are the tools to structure your site.
Importance of Site structure in SEO
As you’re writing more and more blog posts, or add more product pages, your site will get cluttered. You need to organize it neatly, to make sure you, your visitor AND Google will be able to find what they’re looking for. If you do not structure your stuff neatly, your stories, your blog posts, your product pages will get lost. Your visitors will not be able to find what they are looking for, and, important for your SEO: Google will also get lost.
How it works?
1. Remove old content
Lots of shops will sell a different collection of products (clothes; shoes) every season. If you don’t expect to sell the same product again, you should remove the page. However, you may have had some links to the page you want to remove. And you know, links to your page are valuable for your SEO! You want to make sure you benefit from these links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore. That’s why you should redirect the URL.
2. Evaluate your categories
You should ensure that categories are about the same size. Categories become too large when you write a lot about one specific subject and less about others. At one point, you should divide that one category into two categories. A good rule of thumb for the size of categories is to make sure that no category is more than twice the size of any other category. When one category is significantly larger than other ones, your site becomes unbalanced. You’ll have a hard time ranking with blog posts within a huge category. The pile has become too large to search through. In this case, you should evaluate and optimize the category: perhaps merge or split some of them.
3. Improve your internal linking structure
You should link to the most essential content on your site to show Google that these articles are your best and most complete articles. A great internal linking structure is crucial for Google, but it makes sense to users too.