How to Improve Your Website & Make Search Engines Rank Your Site
If your website resembles a random collection of pages, both humans and search engines will have a hard time finding the right information.
A website’s architecture refers to how its information and pages are structured and linked. It’s a very essential part of on-page SEO and user experience and it’s offend overlooked. Let’s look into how we can fix it.
In this guide, we’ll share strategies that you can implement today.
Why Does Website Architecture Matter?
Website architecture is important to both visitors and search engines. By logically organizing your site using features such as sitemaps and breadcrumbs, you make it easy for the search engines to navigate your site and understand what it is you offer.
All to say, good website architecture will give you more chances to rank and help each page rank higher.
Good website architecture also makes it easy for visitors to find what they need for your site and that can impact conversions. There are many studies that show UX has a direct impact on conversion rates.
Ultimately, the health and profitability of your website hinge on the quality of your website’s architecture. The better your site’s architecture and the easier it is for people to navigate, the higher it will rank, and the more visitors will convert.
Use Simple Navigational Structure
According to the results of a recent survey, bad website navigation is one of the top three reasons a user leaves a website.
Optimize Your URL Structure
Your URL structure is one of the best ways to ensure your site stays organized. URLs show your site’s hierarchy to humans and search bots and help them see where each page belongs and how they relate.
Create a Site Map
A sitemap is a list of all the crawlable pages on your site. It’s an essential part of the architecture of your website because it displays your site structure in a format both search engines and humans can read and crawl.
Sitemaps are used by Google’s crawlers to understand the organizational structure of your website better and get a sense of which pages are most important.
Use Canonical Tags
Canonical tags might sound advanced, but they are not. It’s a strategy used for high-level on-page SEO. When you have multiple versions of the same page on your site, canonical tags are simply a way of letting Google and other search engines know which one matters most.
Canonical tags significantly reduce the chances of duplicate content and stop search bots from wasting crawl time on similar pages that don’t need to be indexed.
Final Words – Website Architecture
How you structure your website has a huge bearing on user experience and SEO. All things being equal, improve your site architecture and you’ll boost your conversion rate and increase your rankings.
The most important rule of all, however, is to keep it very simple. The simpler you can keep your website architecture, the easier it will be to manage as your site grows.
Have questions about your websites architecture? Reach out by clicking here and we’ll walk you through the process.