Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After this module you will be able to distinguish between site structure and a pillar and cluster strategy, the importance of site structure for SEO and how to use common site structure elements.
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20:40
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2.2.1 What Is Site Structure and Why Is It Important?
Site structure is how your website’s content is organized. Publishers tend to put out content regularly, which means that pretty soon you’ll have a large amount of coverage on related topics. It makes sense then to organize this content so that it becomes easy to access.
For instance, the screenshot below shows how The Economist organizes the content on its website under different categories. This is their site structure. 
Everytime a user clicks on a post on The Economist’s website, they know exactly where they are within this site structure as well as how to find their way back to the homepage or to other pages. In the screenshot below, we can clearly see the path that the user followed to get to this particular page, which is Finance & economics > US economy.
Breadcrumbs represent a trail that leads both users and web crawlers to specific pages, acting much like the breadcrumb trail in the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale.
Site structure is important because of its utility. Without site structure, users see a random collection of articles that not only makes navigation difficult, but makes little sense to them. If users have difficulty finding what they are looking for, they will have little incentive to return to the website.
Having a well-defined site structure is important. Yet, many publishers seem to neglect it. This is often because they:
Yes, it does. Which is why site structure is constantly evolving. In the early days of the internet, websites usually looked like this:
This is a website designed to hold a small amount of content. It is structured along a very primitive linear model in which pages have a simple parent-child structure. Clicking on a parent link leads to a child page.
Websites structured this way today are at a disadvantage in terms of ranking on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) because of the large amounts of content that modern sites contain. Both users and web crawlers would have a hard time navigating it and making sense of its content.
This is the reason that websites now have more dynamic site structures. Site structure helps with SEO in the following ways:
Siloing content is the practice of using categories to organize content around keyword-related themes. This not only makes the website easy to navigate, it also helps build topical authority for those keywords and topics, thereby improving SEO.
Organizing content in pillars and clusters also helps to build topical authority while improvising ease of navigation. Clusters are thematically related topics that internally link to one another and the thematic pillar topic they are centered around.
The content and pillar strategy is increasingly emerging as one of the most effective for SEO. This is what content organized in pillars and clusters looks like:
For more information on internal linking strategies, please review our dedicated module on the topic.
Cannibalisation is when different pages on your website begin to compete with each other for the same keywords/topics. This happens in cases when you have not organized different posts on related topics according to a well-defined structure. This results in Google treating them as competing posts, rather than as complementary or supplementary posts. A well-thought out site structure will clearly inform a web crawler of the order of importance of various posts relating to the same topic, thus avoiding cannibalisation.
Now that we know what site structure is and why it is important, we turn next to understanding how to optimize site structure to improve SERP rankings.
To build an efficient site structure, focus on the following:
URLs are important for SEO for three reasons:
However, over and above these three reasons, URL structure is important because it is representative of your website’s structure. This is because a URL represents the path a user has taken to reach a particular page on your website.
For example, if you run a news website that provides global media coverage, you might have a news story about the latest Netflix shows. You could structure it in one of two ways:
The first URL type is called a hierarchical URL, while the second is a flat URL. Which URL type you implement depends on your site structure and how you foresee it evolving over time.
A flat URL’s advantage is its flexibility in relation to the evolution of your category coverage. In the example above, changing the category of newswebsite.com/upcoming-netflix-films is simpler than that of the hierarchical URL, because it is something you can do on your CMS’ backend.
This is handy for new publishers who are finding their feet in terms of coverage as well as publishers of evergreen content who may want to repurpose content to drive traffic into a new category without losing page authority. Using 301 redirects for hierarchical URLs means those pages will lose a small amount of their page authority.
If you have no such requirements, then hierarchical URLs will suffice as they tend to be more semantical, providing greater level of detail to both web crawlers and users about the nature of the article. This in turn helps with both SERP rankings and user experience (UX).
For more on semantics and its relevance to web crawlers, see our module on design and layout.
To sum up, pay attention to your URLs and make sure they reflect the underlying structure of your website.
Taxonomies help Google understand what your website’s content is all about. A poorly designed taxonomy can drain your crawl budget, as Google may end up exhausting the number of pages it crawls for your URL without fully getting a sense of what your website is all about.
A good taxonomy will employ category pages and tags to help organize content under specific topics. Taxonomies are most commonly of four types:
Each type comes with its own sets of benefits.
Irrespective of which taxonomy you deploy, the key to building an efficient taxonomy is to structure your content like a book. This means two things:
When Google crawls and indexes your page, it is increasingly seeking to read and understand content the way humans would try to make sense of a book. This is because of the increased use of natural language processing (NLP)
During its 2019 BERT algorithm update, Google announced the use of a new, advanced algorithm called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). BERT enabled Google to determine search intent more accurately by using NLP to understand the complete context of content.
Ultimately, Google’s intent is to help its users find the content they seek as quickly and as efficiently as is possible. Which means you need to structure your website to enable Google to achieve this goal.
Thanks to Google’s BERT update though, this does not always mean relying on taxonomies built around keywords. Depending on the industry you operate in, providing a lot of context to a search engine by creating topical authority and meaningful content might be the better approach.
Google’s bots are now capable of understanding the complete context within which a search query is embedded. Which means they also look for semantically-related terms along with keyword density to help improve semantic search.
For example, when a user searches for the term “bitcoin”, Google’s bots may now also be able to process related terms such as “cryptocurrency”, “token” and “blockchain”, infer that these are closely related to the intended search and show content containing these terms in the search results as well.
This is why it is important that website structure helps to organize semantically-related content together. This means content built around specific topics is as important as keywords in forming the organizing principle of your website’s taxonomy.
It is important to ensure that the most strategic pages in your site are reachable by a few clicks. Burying important pages too deep can affect their page rank. Here are some best practices to optimize your website’s navigation:
The menu is the most important part of your website’s navigability. Most users who land on its homepage will use the menu to access different pages. From an SEO perspective, it makes sense to have your most important pages accessible from the menu. At the same time, you don’t want to pack your menu with too many links as this can disrupt the UX.
Make sure the menu of the mobile version of the website has the same links as the desktop version to avoid confusing users and web crawlers who might try accessing your website from different platforms.
The footer is the place where you place links to pages that are not as important as the ones in the top menu such as About Us, Careers, Terms and Conditions, etc.
It is also good practice to place a link to your website’s sitemap in the footer. Sitemaps come in two kinds — XML sitemaps and HTML Sitemaps. An XML sitemap assists web crawlers in locating the pages on your site, whereas an HTML sitemap is a directory of all the pages on your website. Sitemaps help with SEO by improving navigability.
Categories and tags help to further classify your content. Where categories provide a hierarchical classification of content, tags tend to be more flat. Content can be classified under one category but may have several tags. However, going overboard with the use of category pages and tags can be counterproductive.
For more on categories and tags, see this SODP article.
Internal links are links from one page to another within your website. Building internal links has the following benefits for SEO:
Site depth or page depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the homepage. In the Forbes example below, it takes two clicks to reach the relevant page from the homepage — Investing > Editor’s Pick.
This means the page depth in this case is two. While there is no fixed number for an optimal page/site depth, it is a good idea to limit the depth to four clicks from the homepage.
Site depth is important for two reasons:
Having covered the essentials of site architecture, we next need to look at a few strategies that, though not as important to the optimization process, have the potential to yield tangible SEO benefits if executed well.
Faceted navigation is another term for using search filters. These are most commonly used by eCommerce sites that allow search to be filtered according to certain criteria. Publishers too often deploy faceted navigation when they provide options to filter content by date, topic, author name, etc.
While faceted navigation improves UX, it can create the following problems for SEO:
Different versions of the same page can be created when filters sort the content in different ways. For instance if we apply a filter to sort articles on a news site by date, two versions of the same page can be created — one listing the results by newest first and the other by oldest first.
Given the various combinations of pages with the same content, but arranged in different order that can be created in a filtered search, internal links may end up linking to different versions of the same page, thereby wasting link juice.
By the same logic as above, Googlebot may end up crawling different versions of the same page, thus draining the crawl budget allotted by Google for your website.
Since a very large combination of pages can possibly be created by applying different search filters, crawler bots may end up getting trapped in crawling these pages.
This issues with faceted navigation can be avoided by:
Embedding internal links in widgets and sidebars instead of the main menu alone is a creative internal linking strategy that serves two purposes:
The pillar and cluster model of organizing website content is increasingly being accepted as the most efficient model for improving search rankings.
In a classic pillar and cluster model a parent page (the pillar) links out to child pages (the cluster). These child pages then link to each other, creating a cluster. For more on pillars and clusters, see this module.
Having covered what we need to do to optimize site architecture, we can now look at some of the things we need to avoid to make the most of site architecture best practices.
Deleting outdated content can be as effective for SEO as creating new content. Google keeps a track of content you published ages ago, and if that content is not up-to-date, or is providing information that is not obsolete, it could harm your website’s ranking.
This process of cleaning up old, obsolete or poor-performing content is called content pruning. When deleting old URLs, make sure to use 301 redirects to send users and web crawlers to the new URL.
How To Do This
Executing a 301 redirect can be done by editing the .htaccess file if you’re using a Linux-based web hosting service. The .htaccess file can be found by logging into the cPanel if your hosting provider.
Here are the steps involved:
Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://www.mywesbite.com/new-page.html
Be warned, however, that performing a manual 301 redirect requires technical expertise and is only advisable if you’re an experienced web developer or systems administrator. If not handled correctly, changes to the .htaccess file could alter your site’s functionality. A simpler way of implementing a 301 redirect is by using a plug-in for your particular CMS.
If you are using WordPress, you can use a plug-in such as Yoast SEO Redirect Manager, Redirection WordPress plug-in, AISEO or any other plug-in of your choice. Once you’ve installed the plug-in, follow these steps:
URLs can often contain dates which can disrupt UX. Well-structured URLs inform users about a page’s content.
Dates in URLs can look incongruous and obsolete once the content becomes old. It is, therefore, a good practice to set up your URL structure to exclude dates.
How To Do This
To remove dates from your URL structure, follow these steps:
Please note that changing the URL structure of existing posts could result in 404 errors, which imply that the requested URL could not be found on the server. To deal with these, it is recommended to set up URL redirects using the steps explained previously.
Changing the URL structure of new posts however, does not cause errors.
It’s also worth noting that Google has long advised against altering existing URLs, owing to the technical challenges this can create. In reiterating this advice, Google Search advocate John Mueller added that you’d have to be “lucky” to have an altered URL rank in the same SERP spot as the original URL.
For more on dates, please review our detailed module on the subject.
Rendering Javascript is resource-heavy compared to code written in plain HTML. As a result, search engines typically render the HTML portion of a page’s source code first, and then the Javascript portion. Sometimes, they may omit rendering the Javascript component altogether.
Pages that are heavily reliant on Javascript may be indexed slower compared to pages using mostly plain HTML.
As a result, it is advisable to use plain HTML for the most important elements on your page. This includes the menu, navigation, header, footer and sidebar. This ensures that all the navigational elements and the elements containing internal links are rendered in the initial HTML response.
Any non-essential Javascript elements can then be rendered in their own time without compromising on the basic structure and functioning of the page. For more on the importance of plain HTML and the need to balance out Javascript usage, see our detailed module on design and layout.
Inconsistent website layout and design can impact a site’s content siloing as well as its internal linking. For instance, consider the following website:
The top menu has only five categories. However, when we click on the hamburger menu on the top left, we see a completely different set of categories:
What this indicates is that site categorization, and by extension, internal linking is not consistent. This in turn impacts internal link distribution, leading to a sub-optimal site architecture.
Small Biz Trends publishes content about the latest developments in the world of small business. According to similarweb.com, it receives around 2.4 million visitors per month with 60% of them being located in the US.
The most interesting thing about the site, however, is that more than 70% of its traffic comes from organic searches.
How does it manage this?
Among other things, it uses site structure best practices including:
For instance, below we see a top menu with easily accessible topic pillars.
If we click on a topic pillar such as marketing, we see a number of clusters surrounding it, all related to marketing:
Each topic in this cluster further acts as a pillar around which a number of other topics are clustered. So clicking on Content Marketing further leads to a number of topic clusters:
At the same time, the site structure isn’t very deep. Nearly all the content is accessible within three to four clicks at most.
The site does, however, have room to improve. Its URLs, for instance, contain dates, which could be removed to improve the UX.
Rugbypass features content about rugby news, players, tournaments, fixtures, statistics, etc. The site demonstrates an impressive use of taxonomic classification to improve ease of crawling, ease of access and build topical authority.
For example, clicking on a link for a player opens up a child page in which all the content related to that player is accessible under further links.
In the example we below we clicked on the page for Aaron Smith:
We further see links to the player’s profile, news about the player, the teams he plays for and his statistics.
Clicking on the links however does not load a different page and the URL remains the same. The URLs are also neat, contain keywords and do not have any dates.
Good site structure helps both your visitors and Google navigate your site. It makes it easier to implement changes and helps you prevent content cannibalisation. Make sure that your website has:
In addition to the above, following the detailed guidelines provided in this course plan will ensure that you have a well-optimized site structure.
