Your Site Stucture
Paying close attention to your structure when you’re creating a website is important for two main reasons.
- How easy it is for a human user to navigate.
- How easy it is for a search engine spider to navigate.
Navigating For Humans
I find the simplest way of helping humans navigate a site is by having a left hand menu bar with all of your main categories. This way people can easily bring up any subject they want (that you have a page for).
Don’t worry about using menu bars in a site you’re creating. It’s a simple thing to add to your site if you’re using web design software like Rapidweaver or Dreamweaver.
ebay are a great example of this. They have a main page with very broad categories listed.
If you click any of the subjects they list you are immediately taken to another page with all of the subcategories within that section.
All in all you can drill down at least three times in most cases through each of their homepage categories. ebay are great at giving you a general homepage and then hundreds of very specific subpages.
The whole idea is to try and emulate a growing tree with many branches (cheesy I know, but it’s a good way to describe it).
Interior Linking for Humans
Another way of helping people navigate easily, and also a way of keeping them in your site, is using internal linking.
I try to link to other sections of my site at the beginning and end of each page I write. This makes it a bit more like a library. Also, if I speak about another subject in one of pages (I might discuss SEO in my Create Web Traffic pages) I’ll link to that other page within my site.
If you look at the example of www.ezinearticles.com below, you can see that at the end of an article, right at the bottom, they have interior links for related articles and interior links for top rated articles. This not only helps the user get more information, but it also keeps them browsing your site for longer.
Navigating for Spiders
Making it easy for search engine spiders to navigate and index your site is very important if you want to get ranked for your chosen keywords.
If you click on the Keywords section it gives you an in-depth look at how to create a keyword list. The list you end up with will consist of the major keyword phrases your site is about and then all of the other more specific phrases.
This keyword list can then be used in your site structure. For example this site (www.increaseyourpaydays.com)
One of my main keywords is “make money online”. If you look down the menu bar I have more specific phrases that are all related to “make money online”. Then you can drill down each section for yet another set of specific keyword phrases.
Search engine spiders love this kind of layout, especially if it’s all linked together with interior links. The spiders can pickup keywords like “make money online” but they also pickup the related keywords from all over your site (through interior links) This will get you ranked far higher.
There are hundreds of great sites out there with fantastic content, but they don’t get any traffic because the general structure doesn’t make it easy enough to navigate for humans or search engine spiders.
Interior Links for Spiders
Like I said earlier, interior links are great for keeping humans on your site for longer, but this principle also works for spiders. If a spider finds a content rich page with plenty of keywords it loves it. If you have a link in that page to another content rich, keyword packed page then you’re on to a winner.
*top tip – if you’ve created a link (exterior or interior) in your page, make sure you link an actual keyword phrase like “create a website”. Don’t link from the words “click here”. It makes a keyword phrase more powerful to spiders if it’s a link.
Create a Website / Section 1 / Finding a Niche
Create a Website / Section 2 / Is there a Market?
Create a Website / Section 3 / Register a Domain
Create a Website / Section 4 / Selecting a Web Host
Create a Website / Section 5 / Building Your Website
Create a Website / Section 6 / Your Website Structure
Create a Website / Section 7 / Uploading Your Site