It’s important to structure all of your web pages in a meaningful way because, in order for Google to return your pages to searchers in response to relevant search queries, they need to understand how your pages relate to one another. 

Site Structure Optimisation

All websites need a certain structure that is designed and optimised for users and also the Googlebot.

Your users need a clear structure to navigate through your site, to click from one page to the other. And Google uses the structure of your site in order to determine what content is important and what content is less important.

Take the Qantas website for example, the structure is separated into different groups of content (also referred to a taxonomy). At the very top you can see 'flights, hotels, shopping, wine, money' - these are different business under Qantas.

Next you'll note the main customer structure and navigation - destinations, flight deals, book, frequent flyer etc.

Poor site structure is super detrimental to Google understanding your site. You might find websites that have no navigation at all, or they force you to scroll for way too long down a single page to find content, some sites might have the main navigation but then bury relevant content pages under so many click-through pages that you’re over it before you get to the actual content page.

Remember, Google is just trying to emulate users having to figure out your site. So, once you spend some time designing and developing a site structure that’s logical and easy for people to understand and navigate through, you can feel confident that search engines will understand your site structure as well.

Hot Tip: Good site structure is built from logical and customer-first perspective. If someone hasn’t been to your site or doesn’t know anything at all about your products, you’ll want your site structure to be super clear and easy to flow through.

Tips for Optimising your Website Structure

The structure of your site should be like a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid is your homepage, and underneath the homepage a number of category pages and for larger sites, you should also make subcategories.

Within the categories and subcategories, you will have a number of blog posts, pages or product pages.

Your linking structure is also super important for usability and also SEO. Each page in the top of a pyramid should link to its subpages. And vice versa, all the subpages should link back to the pages on top of the pyramid.