Optimizing site structure in local SEO part 2

I have explained a little bit about optimizing the site structure in the previous article. In this article, I will continue explaining it. I have written about the structures of different sites and first about an online store.

Now, if you’re an informational site, you may be organized by topics and then dates of publication. Whatever structure and strategy you choose, a clean site structure will really help search engines understand your entire website, find your content, and help searchers find what they’re looking for. On the other hand, a bad site structure can be detrimental to a search engine understanding your site. You might find websites that have no navigation at all, or they force you to scroll for hours through a single page, a single-tier site map to find exactly what you’re looking for.

You might see links that take users down a dead-end path, with no way to get back to where they started. You might click on links that just go to pages that don’t exist anymore. Back to our bookstore example, think how difficult it would be if you walked in the front door, and there was just one big sign that listed every book in the whole store, line by line in random order. Or worse, what if they never updated that sign when people bought a book, and it wasn’t even in the store anymore. If a search engine can’t understand the layout of your site, doesn’t believe that the structure makes sense, or finds all kinds of missing pages, they may not come back much, and they certainly won’t be recommending you to other people.

Because everyone’s websites and objectives are different, there’s no right structure that works for everyone. The most important thing to remember is that your site structure should be clear to you, and it should be clear to people. Remember, search engines are just trying to emulate human processes. 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.