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Website Structure And Navigation Strategies

Improve Your Website's Visibility and Performance

Site structure and navigation are two critical elements of a successful SEO strategy and online presence. They are complementary in nature and when executed effectively, serve as the foundational block in user experience and the indexability of your site.  Simply put, site structure is the architecture of a website. It is the way in which pages are linked to one another. Having a well-organized site structure allows your site to be more easily crawled and indexed by search engines, which results in the higher likelihood of pages showing up for relevant search results.

All Websites Need a Solid Structure 

  • WEBSITE HIERARCHY: Establishing a hierarchy of information is the best place to start. The home page should be the broadest statement about the purpose of the website. From there, top category pages should similarly explain in somewhat broad terms the content of each category. Subcategory and product pages follow with respective increases in specificity as to the purpose of each page.
  • WEBSITE URL STRUCTURE: Sites with well thought out structure maintain a relatively low depth of pages, with the actionable product pages being reachable in 3-4 clicks. They also have an easy to follow URL structure and utilize an effective internal linking strategy. One of the most prominent uses of internal linking is in the navigation.

Digital Marketing Strategy

Help Users find What they Need with Well Organized Website Navigation

While site structure is the organization of the website, navigation is how that organization is communicated to the user. It is also how the user can interact with the site to find the information they are looking for. If a website is a book, then the navigation is akin to the table of contents.
When designing an industrial website, we keep two things in mind while building the navigation.
  • It should follow the website site structure closely
  • It should be made with the user in mind


 

Organized Information on your Website Improves User Experience and SEO

The navigation should be well-organized, intuitive, and relatively succinct. Product-level pages do not need to be included in the navigation, but the subcategory pages under which they are grouped should be easily discernable. We can also add features like drop-downs and fly-outs to keep your navigation clean and user-friendly.

Navigation benefits SEO as it is the largest section of Internal Links, which are the links that point to other pages on your website. Internal Links are valuable to search engine optimization (SEO) because they help search engines better understand the structure of your site. The better they understand your site, the more likely it is your website will appear in search results.

​Work With Ecreative to Improve your Site Structure and Navigation

By designing a well-organized site structure with a user-focused, intuitive navigation, you will be setting your website up for success. While it might not be the most glamorous part of design, it is a step that cannot be overlooked.

Request a Website Structure Evaluation to Get Started