Whether or not a general user is able to find required
information from your website does make a huge difference. If a user is able to
find required information quickly and easily on your website, the reputation of your website will get better not only among the users but also among major
search engines. Search engines look at the structure of your website to understand
the relation between different topics.
In other words, a good website structure will not only help
the visitors to easily find information they would be looking for but it will
also suggest search engines to assign better rank to your website.
Flat site structure
vs. deep site structure
The two most common types of website structures are flat and deep. While deep site structures usually make the users to go deep into the
navigation to find required information, the flat site structure makes the
pages accessible with only a few clicks.
While it may be inevitable for the websites with huge number
of pages to have deep website structures, the websites with less than 1000
pages should be given flat site structures.
Deep site structures do not only make it difficult for the
users to find the required content but search engines also take more time to
index the pages. Flat site structures, on the other hand, not only make the
crawling of search engine easier but they also tend to make information highly
accessible to users.
Site structure that
makes sense
Making a website structure flat is not the only requirement
you need to consider. A good website structure is the one that makes it
convenient for the search engines to understand the content and relationship between
several pages. Although, search engines are smart enough to guess this
relationship but making them guess this way would only delay the indexing of
your website. So, you can give direction to the search engines.
It can be done by building semantic relationship between
different topics. You can start by putting primary pages in the main categories
and then adding subcategories and more pages under the appropriate categories.
Navigation and
sitemap
Navigation is basically made visible in order to make the
browsing experience better for users. And technically, it is a visual
representation of the website structure. So, when we talk about making a
website structure flat for easier browsing, it’s the navigation which is going
to facilitate user in this regard.
So, it is important to develop an easy-to-use navigation.
And, it is the task which should not be done in haste. Rather, you should take
proper time to make sure that navigation of your website is not only easier but
it also represents the good website structure you have been working hard to
develop.
Similarly, sitemap of the website is another important page
that holds importance when it comes to facilitating indexing of the website.
While many site owners add HTML sitemaps, most of the site owners prefer XML.
HTML sitemap is used by humans while XML is readable by search engines. It is
recommended to have both sitemaps on the website.
