How You Should Plan Your Website Structure

You must know the right way to plan the structure of your website because it has many roles. The major benefit you get from it is elevated user experience and SEO. SEO and user experience are intertwined in many ways.

With a proper website, you will get several other benefits as well. It is quite an easy task to plan your website structure if you know about the purpose of the website. However before we get in all the important details, let us talk a bit about the basics. 

What is the website structure?

Web structure has not much to do with the design and other such elements. The structure of a website refers to the way different web pages are connected with each other. It must have a proper and step-by-step way to lead people from the home page to the deeper pages on the website.

A well-planned and good structure becomes very much important if your subject is broad. Some other important factors make it even more important. 

Why should you plan the structure of your website?

Let us explain the whole context for you. Think of the situation if you build your house without any structure, wouldn’t it be horrendous? In the same way, you are not going to guide visitors anywhere if your website has been built without any structure.

One thing worth knowing is that the structure of a website is not only related to the main website instead, it also comprises blogging and other internal linking features. 

It elevates the user experience

User experience lies at the centre of website structure and SEO. At this time, people have a very short duration of time to decide whether a website is good or bad. Better user experience is the major constituent of SEO these days. When users start spending more time on your website, it will be ranked better by the search engines. 

Enhances SEO and makes your website easy to crawl

When you have made a better structure of your website, you are simply giving a signal to the search engines that pieces of content are connected together and the links are working better. Such signals are considered an important factor by the search engines to decide the rank of your website. 

Apart from this, the website needs to be conveniently accessible to the crawlers. And you will be able to do it only by planning a good structure for your website. When the structure is not fine, crawlers are unable to find all the pages on your website, and hence you will make it difficult for them. 

How to plan your website structure for better results?

Now you are well aware of the fundamentals, let us have a look at how you can do it. We are going to mention some essential points involved in this process. 

First, you should have fundamental information about your business

This is the step from where you have to start. As an owner, you might be well aware of your business however you should be precisely aware of its motives and objectives for online presence.

Without getting this information right, your website will lead you nowhere. Here are some essential questions that you need to ask regarding your business:

• What industry does your business belong to?
• The possible alternatives to your business?
• Who are your competitors?
• The price range of products/services that you offer?

Such information will act as a solid starting point to start designing your website. With the incorporation of proper knowledge about your competitors, you can make your website quite different from them and hence people will perceive you as a better option. 

Spend considerable time on competition and keyword research

These two things are very important for the proper growth and development of your website. Keywords are used to drive more traffic to your website and you need to do it very precisely for better results.

There is a free-of-cost add-on called Keywords Everywhere that you can install in your Chrome. It will give you enough information about long tail keywords you should focus your energies on.

After that comes the research on your competitors. Now you are done with the keyword research, get some knowledge about your competitors. Once you get enough idea about the way they get traffic and keywords used in that process, you will be able to approach audiences in a way better than them.

You can do it by taking one keyword and then see who ranks the best for it. After getting enough knowledge about the website, go to Ubersuggest and paste the URL of that website to get more vital pieces of information. Ubersuggest will give you almost every vital piece of information needed for this purpose. 

Focus on building the hierarchy of your website

You have got every essential information by now and it is time to arrange the information in the right way. Make sure you arrange everything in a way so that the visitors find it more convenient and user-friendly.

First, you need to make a rough diagram consisting of all the pages in your website like the home page and other sub-pages. The hierarchy should be simple so that linking would also be simple for you. 

Make a suitable URL structure for your website

URL structure is the most important part of your website structure. It is designed right after building the hierarchy of your website. When you are designing the structure of your website, make sure you are using words instead of symbols, IDs, and other formats. 

Then you should work on internal linking. It is the thing that makes your website work. Users are able to navigate seamlessly due to the right internal linking. When the internal linking works right, the Google bot and other such tools are able to find the content on your website easily. 

Final words

These basic elements are the ones that are not visible to the users however they affect the user behaviour on your website. It is essential to focus on these if you are about to plan your website structure.

Apart from all the tips mentioned above, you should always try to design the website in a simple and elegant way. Designing a conveniently fine navigation menu is really helpful because most users are confused about it. Once you get everything done right, you will be able to get desired results in the future.