4 Website Structure Elements That Impact SEO

Most marketers believe that keywords are solely responsible for a website’s ranking. Their core focus revolves around fixing keyword arrangements to keep them relevant across the webpages. However, apart from keywords, some website elements are also very important to a website’s ranking. They can obviously impact site’s SEO prospects. Website structure is one of them. A website’s structure deter-mines the way website is organized internally. The structure doesn’t necessarily mean the physical appearance of a website, but also the way in which website’s pages are interlinked.

An organized website structure is very important for search engine optimization. Without fixing the gaps pertaining to the structure, you can’t achieve maximum benefits out of your SEO efforts.

I am listing here 4 important considerations that you look into in order to strengthen your SEO.

1. Website’s Crawlability:

Crawlability of a website is important in terms of its appearance in search results. The term refers a search engine’s ability to crawl through a website in order to establish what the website content is all about. If crawling of your website halts for any reason, it can cause problems for SEO. Throughout the crawling, robots navigate through subpages and individual topics to figure out every element of the website a whole. A website is said to be Crawlable if site’s pages are interconnected well and pose no difficulty for users in navigating one place to the other.

So, how it helps in SEO? It’s simple. If crawling of your website is halted or paused, there are chances that some of your well-optimized web pages could miss the indexing. The point I want to raise it that unless your website is properly crawled and indexed, your SEO efforts won’t get noticed.

2. Internal Linking:

Internal linking is another crucial factor that impacts SEO. The term refers to the entire navigation scheme that a website adopts to enhance a website’s accessibility and user experience. The basic idea behind the navigation is that a random user should be able to find one page to another without any hassle. If a website contains over many hundred pages, it’s a challenge to ensure accessibility of any page with only a few clicks.

Usability experts opine that if it takes more than three clicks to find any individual page, then you need to rethink your navigation scheme. Managing your navigation and internal linking is easy. Categorize and organize navigation link according to the segments they relate to.

To link pages and posts internally, use keywords within the content and then link these keywords to other relevant pages or piece of content on your website. There are numerous benefits that internal linking serves. Internal linking easily decreases the page depth and allows users an easier way to find other pages. It can result in a better user experience.

3. User Experience:

Make note of it that poor user experience can negatively affect your SEO efforts. While browsing your website if a user can’t figure out how to get the desired information, he will exit to find it somewhere else. Google measures user interaction with a website using different metrics, including click-through rate, time spent on site, and bounce rate etc.

To ensure a better user experience, you need to align click-through with expectations and ensure quick as well as easy access of desired information.

4. Duplicate Website Pages:

Duplicate content kills your website’s SEO prospects. Google interprets duplicate content as a clear case of deep spam. You should keep your focus on delivering quality content to your readers. It does matter a lot. Not only good quality content enhances user experience, but also improves website’s presence in search engine result pages for high competition keywords.