In this article, we’ll teach you how to set up an SEO friendly website architecture. What, architecture? Don’t worry, we know you are not an architect! Website architecture is a very specific term. It is how pages are structured and linked together in a website. An optimized architecture helps search engines find and index all the pages on your website. Also, it’s easier for visitors to find out what they need with a good architecture. This can indirectly help with your SEO. So, if you want to stay ahead of the SEO game, follow our guide below!
Have you ever heard of content silos? They are very important to SEO. A content silo is an idea of grouping related topics together to establish the website’s keyword-based themes. The idea is very similar to a physical library. How do you find books of your interest in a library? Well, you search books according to the sections such as fiction or nonfiction. That is a content silo, but the old school kind. In the digital world, when you browse through the website, you’ll see this segmentation is done within the navigation or directory.
Content silos are very important to SEO. It is because search engines are like human visitors. They need to have a good understanding of your website’s content. Content silos help with this effort by providing a set of structure. It’s easier for search engines and visitors to find out what they are looking for. Creating theme-based silos throughout a website is also a good way to clearly communicate the relevant themes of a site to search engines.
Another reason to have content silos is that search engines value keyword relevancy and good content. For example, given that you want to rank for the term SEO. It would be much easier if you create a section of content in your website and this section is all about SEO. Having topical content increases the website’s overall authority and thus boosts your rankings.
It also comes to another important concept – content density. Each unique and substantially different article on a related set of topics builds authority. So it is usually better when you have more stuff to display. Content density refers to the ratio of content on a site in relation to the size of that site. For example, who would you trust more for medical advice? A blog with one post or a doctor’s website with 100+ articles about medical topics? When you have more content, it builds authority and credibility for your site.
Pages with higher content density tend to perform better in search engine rankings. It is because websites that have higher content density usually contain content that has keywords. Providing the right keywords helps websites rank higher in search engines. When a search engine bot crawls a website, it is looking for keywords. With more content, it gives websites a better chance of being ranked for specific keywords. In short, when you design a website, you need to do careful content planning for SEO.
One thing to note, websites that have too much content may have a negative impact when the site architecture is poor. It is hard for search engines to crawl in this case. And websites that contain too many keywords may be seen as keyword stuffing. It is an unethical SEO practice and will be considered as offering poor user experience. In this case, the websites will get penalised and lower search engine rankings.
Another good SEO practice is creating related content and linking them together. It is good to set up links between related content on your website. It can guide readers into the next article when they finish reading the existing one. This is a good strategy to keep your visitors engaged. So they can stay longer on your website. It looks better than sending them back to Google, right? It will also deepen their interest in your brand and content.
Implementing an internal linking structure is also very important. Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. It allows your visitors to navigate your website easily. Search engines also follow links to discover content on websites. If a web page gets a lot of links, this is a sign to search engines that it’s an important content. This counts for both internal and external links. While you can’t completely control external links, internal linking is something you manage as a website owner. With the right internal links, you can guide your visitors and Google to your most important pages.
Google evaluates link value between all links on a web page too. Usually, the homepage of a website has the greatest link value. That link value will be shared between all the links found on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on. In other words, your newest posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage. And Google will find your new posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage. If your posts are linked from the category page, they will get less link value. In short, more links to a post mean more value. Google sees a page that gets lots of valuable links as more important. To master the game of SEO, you need to plan your links strategy carefully and know how to promote your valuable content.
After reading the above guide, you are a qualified “SEO architect” now! Let’s get your hands dirty and build a SEO-friendly architecture for your website!