By Jayne Schultheis — A great website structure involves more than just looking good — it's a crucial factor in boosting your SEO performance. The architecture of your website directly impacts how easily search engines crawl and index your content, which in turn influences your rankings.

In this article, we’ll explore why website structure is an essential part of search engine optimization and how you can optimize your website to improve visibility, user engagement, and search engine rankings.

Website structure defines user experience

A well-designed site that provides useful and engaging content will encourage visitors to stay longer, reducing bounce rates and giving your site a better chance to draw attention.

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How do you use site structure to boost traffic and gather leads? What are the crucial elements that signal to both search engines and readers that you're a trustworthy and authoritative resource in your industry? We'll share a number of clear and effective ways to improve your content creation and web design. Let's call it a "UX design for SEO best practices" checklist for a site audit.

UX and URL best practices

When you're building an effective website, put yourself in the perspective of a site visitor who knows nothing about your site or products. In general, URLs should be:

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• Clean
• Short
• Descriptive
• Keyword rich
• Representative of the site's page hierarchy. For example: https://rellify.com/blog/content-strategy-challenges.

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When crafting a seamless user journey into and within your site, you'll want to implement:

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• Main navigation (top-level pages). The most important pages of the site should be easily accessible from the homepage. Most sites use a navigation bar across the top of the homepage that leads to product and service pages, contact page, about the company page, and others. The “hamburger,” which is three lines in the upper left corner of the site, the vertical bar, and the vertical drop-down bar are ways to offer vertical navigation bars that are useful on mobile devices.
• Categories and subcategories. Use categories, subcategories, and sub-subcategories to group related content logically, making it easier for search engines to crawl and understand.
• Breadcrumb navigation. Organize your URLs so that wherever visitors are on your site, they can see the path back to the home page. This technique takes its name from trail of breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel left behind them to find their way home — although breadcrumb navigation works much better. Every page on your site should have an icon that can be clicked to return to the home page. Even so, this arrangement of URLs allows search engines and readers to see how your site is organized. You can see the site's content hierarchy, and the URLs provide information in search results that help to improve click-through rates.
• Clear call to action (CTA). Each page should have a clear CTA to guide users toward completing an action, improving engagement and conversions.
• Search functionality. A well-functioning internal search tool can help users quickly find content. Be sure to index all relevant pages for search results.

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Dynamic URLs with unnecessary parameters (e.g., domain.com/page?id=12345) are less SEO-friendly than static URLs, so avoid them if you can.

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Let's look at an example of how to structure your URLs. Imagine you're a consulting firm named "Silverstone Strategy Group." You want to add a blog section to your website to capture more foot traffic from search engines. You call that blog section "Insights" and one subsection of the blog is a collection of articles on corporate leadership development. The focus keyword of the latest article is "online seminars and conferences." In that case, a great URL structure would look like this:

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www.silverstonesg.com/insights/leadership-developement/online-seminars-and-conferences

Internal linking

When you have lots of great content that shows off your expertise, you want your readers (and search engines) to know that they don't have to leave your website to find what they're looking for. That's where internal links can help. They can encourage a reader to click into another page. This gives you another chance to show a Call to Action and book them as a customer. Here are some best practices for the use of internal linking.

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• Anchor text. Choose descriptive anchor text that accurately reflects the content on the linked page. Use keywords and page titles as anchor text to make the relevance clear to readers and bots.
• Link distribution. Important pages (e.g., cornerstone content or pillar pages) should have the most internal links pointing to them.
• Contextual linking. Link from one page to another that will shed more light on the subject or provide more context. For example, from this article on UX and SEO through site structure, we can contextual linking to connect readers with an article in this blog about link-building and one on how to design a user experience. The first one adds context for this paragraph and subsection on linking. The second one adds context for this article about improving the UX experience. This form of linking  improves the flow of link equity and content relevance.

Mobile-friendly design

The percentage of web traffic that comes from mobile devices has steadily increased every year since smartphones hit the scene. As a result, Google has consistently prioritized mobile-friendliness and uses mobile-first indexing. It bases indexing and ranking on the mobile version of websites. Here are some tips for being mobile friendly.

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• Responsive design. The site should use responsive design, which enables it to adjusts seamlessly to screens of any size. They load quickly and look good on smartphones, personal computers and everything in between.
• Page speed optimization. Slow-loading pages ruin the user experience. Minimize heavy images, use browser caching, and compress files to improve loading times.
• Server performance. Make sure your hosting provider offers reliable performance with minimal downtime.
• Image optimization. When you reduce file sizes, you can get faster load times and smoother user experiences on mobile devices with varying screen sizes and network speeds.

Clean and crawlable code

What exactly is "crawlability? To put it simply, search engines have bots they send out to look through websites' code and content, then report their findings. They register many different aspects of your site, but if your code isn’t "clean" enough it impedes the bots and your rankings may suffer.  That's why your site's code architecture is crucial. Here are some aspects of coding to keep in mind as you're looking at the more technical aspects of your site's SEO.

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• Well-formatted HTML. Use clean, semantic HTML that is easy for search engine crawlers to read.
• XML sitemap. Create and submit an XML sitemap to help search engines discover and index pages more effectively.
• Robots.txt file. Use the robots.txt file to manage which pages should or shouldn’t be crawled by search engines.
• Canonical tags. Use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues. They tell search engines which version of a page is the preferred one.
• Security. Google favors secure websites (HTTPS) over non-secure ones (HTTP). SSL certificates ensure that the website is encrypted and secure for users, which also helps in ranking.
• Alt tags for images. Use descriptive alt attributes for all images to ensure search engines understand their context.
• Structured data (schema markup). Think of structured data like a map key for search engine crawlers. It gives them a shortcut to understanding your content. It also helps rich snippets (star ratings, product info, etc.) to appear in search results, increasing visibility and click-through rates.

404 pages and redirects

Sometimes, website maintenance or migration can cause snags in your user experience and a dip in traffic. Redirects help prevent this.

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• Custom 404 page: Provide a user-friendly custom 404 error page to help users find what they’re looking for if they encounter a broken link. You can even get fun and creative with them.
• 301 redirects: When a page is moved, a permanent 301 redirect should be set up from the old URL to the new URL to pass SEO value and prevent broken links.

Improve your website's returns with Rellify

Rellify can help you streamline your site architecture, making it more intuitive for users while boosting your SEO performance. More critically, Rellify uses AI-powered topic ideation and keyword optimization to help you find exactly what you need to write about in order to be better found on search engines. If you're ready to find out how Rellify can revolutionize the way you do SEO content, talk to one of our experts today.