No Comments Written by Robert on August 13, 2008 – 3:08 pm

An effective Web site structure enhances user experience and allows search engines to determine the subject matter and relevancy of your site. You should create a blueprint of your site before you begin your design and content creation. It is important to keep all related Web site content grouped together into categories.

For example, if your Web site is about gourmet food, you would have a cheese section, a sauce section, and a section on dry goods. Each of your categories should have unique directory and file name structures, so that when your Web site is indexed by search engines, your site demonstrates a wide breadth of content related to the subject.

By doing this, your Web site can be viewed by the search engines as an authority across various areas of gourmet food. You need to spend time working on your Web site structure. Failure to have a properly structured site can make it difficult if not impossible for search engines to properly index your Web site. Such a failure may lead search engines to omit your Web site from the search results and conclude that you are not an authority on the subject matter of your site.

Create a good website structure

When designing your Web site, you want to approach it with a developed plan in place for your Web site structure. A well-structured and organized Web design ensures the search-engine spiders’ ability to read every page of your Web site, provides a positive experience for visitors, and makes changing the design or adding pages much easier. The most significant idea behind choosing a theme for your Web site is to find one and stick with it throughout the entire Web site.

Nothing draws the ire of the search engines more than a Web site with no clear focus or real benefit to a user. If you create a Web site about computers but write content about cars and then link to other Web sites which deal with gardening, you are preventing the search engines from recognizing that you are an authority on computers.

Start with a Plan

Before you start any design work on your Web site, decide how best to structure your Web site. If you sell a variety of products spanning a large number of categories, your Web site will be structured differently from a single-themed informational Web site.

You need to spend time working on your Web site structure.

Once you have made a decision on the overall theme of your Web site, your next step is to begin designing the structure of the site. Start by planning out all the necessary categories and subcategories that your Web site will consist of. Think of the planning stage as a blueprint that enables both your visitors and the search-engine spiders to easily navigate your content.

Build Your Web Site Around a Thematic Structure

Once you have completed planning the layout of your Web site and decided on its overall structure, your next step is to divide the Web site into different categories, or themes. A well-thought-out thematic structure helps maintain a clear delineation between the different content areas of a Web site. In order to achieve high search-engine rankings, you need to appear as an authority on these main topics. Therefore, it is beneficial to design your Web site in well-organized and structured themes that do not confuse users or search engines.

An additional benefit for organizing your Web site in this way is that it allows you to target specific keywords and phrases within each particular section. The home page describes the overall subject in the introduction of the Web site and then breaks down into different subsections that support that major subject.

Take a Web site dealing with Internet marketing as an example of a Web site employing the use of thematic structures. Each subsection of the Web site then focuses on just one aspect on the subject of Internet marketing. Write content and link only to similar content on the subject for each subsection. A subsection on paid search should have pages of content dealing only with paid search. Design your file structure to represent these themes. For example, if your major categories are pay-per-click marketing, search-engine optimization, and online media buying, your file structure should represent this.

Use folders for your main categories like www.example.com/pay-per-click, www.example.com/seo, and www.example.com/media-buying. Although search engines reward Web sites that have large amounts of unique content, it is important that your content does not dilute the individual thematic categories of your site. By adhering to the structure outlined above, you are assuring that the search engines see that you are an authority site for each topic. The purpose of these thematic structured sections is to reinforce the overall subject relevance of your Web site.