Does your website have the correct structure? We tell you here

May
26, 2021

6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

By Juan Carlos Mendoza, SpicyMinds Web Developer

The user experience , better known as UX , It is one of the most important features in the navigation of a website. It should be intuitive and easy to understand when users enter a page. Therefore, we must always ensure that the crawl from search engines to be efficient. But what is crawl and how does it work? Here I tell you a little more.

The crawl is nothing more than the movement of digital spiders that browse the web to search for information. We owe this conception to the word web ( mesh or cobweb , in Spanish). Your website is the information that these arachnids find according to the search interests of each person. And for these spiders to find your site, we must trace an easy and simple path for the crawl . But how do you do it?

Basically there are three points that you must take into account to create a perfect structure for your site.

Here I present them:

The importance of structure on your website

User experience . If people who enter your website easily find what they are looking for and are interested in, you are doing a good job. When this happens, the bounce rate on your page drops and the lower the better. When the opposite happens, your bounce is high and as users enter your website, they are shot. There can be several reasons: bad structure of the web, it is not easy to navigate and much less intuitive.

Web structure . A good site should always ensure that search engines do their job efficiently, that is, they index and navigate naturally.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page) . A correct web structure will help you receive SERP links. This will get the user to the point of interest from the search engine. We must make the engine show the main links of your website when people ask about your business. For example:

^{Image: Spicy Minds}

The characteristics of a correct web structure

Navigation structure

The first thing is to check that it complies with a hierarchy. If you only have one or more sections on your page, make sure there is a hierarchy so that the sections that make up your site are organized.

^{Image: Spicy Minds}

Surface structure

It ensures that users reach the desired section with the fewest possible clicks. If you do this, search engines will prefer your page because of its surface structure.

Internal links

Internal links are a great help when you make them visible. It is important that you make them known to users. For example, through a new blog post, a new product or a main category, each when opening your web page. According to Google developers, “ we know some pages because we have already visited them at some point; others, on the other hand, we find them by following links to known pages that lead us to them. “

If Google or another search engine has your page indexed and you help it by placing internal links in an ideal way, you are making the job easier, ensuring for your site a reward of many visits.

Now that you know what a correct web structure should look like, what do you need to do before publishing your page on the internet?

We go in parts.

1. Structural map design. You should design the structural map of your website with both users as well as search engines in mind, so that they are visible and reachable. Remember that if you don’t, the only thing you’ll be building is a web page with high bounce and little chance of being found.
2. Make sure to go over this list
   • Site map . Try to update it every time you add a new section to your page. This task can be done in a content management system (CMS) like WordPress. You can program it to be done with the help of a plugin.
   • Links ‘nofollow’ . Make sure that no internal link works as a bridge from one section to another, much less that it is classified as ‘nofollow’; doing this would be like turning off the tap that sends water to your house.
   • Duplicate content . Avoid that the names of the sections like us.html , us.php or titles and subtitles, as well as meta descriptions or sections, have the same or similar name, this confuses search engines. If unwanted content gets indexed, you will bring serious problems to your website.
   • Alternative text on images (ALT attribute). Images are information and we can add keywords to them. If we fill in its ALT attribute, you help search engines identify your image and index it. Remember to fill the ALT attribute with keywords sparingly.
   • Orphaned pages. If you already have a web page, but you updated a new one, it may be that the names of your new sections are not named the same as the previous ones. Then the old sections become orphan pages. The problem with this is that the search engines index it and bring traffic to them, but with nothing of value. This is a real problem that you will see reflected in your measurement statistics which, as a consequence, will drop dramatically. To avoid this make sure to add 301 redirects.