This helps create a proper church website site structure for your site. Church Website Site Structure refers to the way in which your website is laid out. The technical aspects of website structure are important because they make the content readable and understandable for search engine crawlers. This structure can help both search engines and users find what they want either by visiting the category of interest or navigating through the content by date.

Your descriptive labels will help alleviate any pain Google may have with your site, ultimately helping you launch up the charts on search. Labels like “Products” will never rank, get creative and find something to make it clear what you’re pushing. If your brand allows it, you can easily spice up this otherwise simple page by adding a vibrant background animation.

If people expect to find top categories in the main navigation bar, it makes sense to keep it there. However, search engine bots appreciate links to related content as it gives more context to the pages they crawl. Importantly, it is also readable by search engines that can subsequently present it to users. A good site structure is nowadays more important than ever. In the past we used to create flat websites with lots of pages targeting specific keywords but that’s no longer the case today. Also, don’t use images to create your navigation links but use text.

Use Your Findings And Use The Right Keywords

If your buttons are a certain color and your links are blue and underlined – keep them that way consistently not to confuse users. To make Google’s life easier, you should prevent it from indexing the filtered results. You don’t want to waste your crawl budget on unimportant URLs like those generated by user activity. Messy structures can cause crawling issues and users to lose patience and leave your website. The most important pages are just a few clicks away from the homepage.

The site structure of an ecommerce website can be a bit more complicated than other types of websites especially when it offers a number of different products. Ideal Site Structure for a BlogBesides the home page and the other pages like about us, contact us etc., blog posts should be grouped into categories according to relevancy. The URL structure should also align with both navigation and breadcrumbs for consistency. Site architecture is often described in terms of flat vs deep.

Make sure that the most visible information is the one that your users value. There are quite a lot of misconceptions that are worth going over in order not to repeat them when building your own website architecture. It is a good practice to keep the URL structure simple and have it follow a consistent pattern. The same goes for buttons and labels or expecting that the logo will be linked to the homepage.

Your priority is still to have it in line with what human users need. When you have thousands of subpages (e.g., products), users should be able to narrow down the choices to more digestible chunks. Search intent is the primary goal a user has in mind when searching using a search engine. External tools bring an objective perspective to the table. They also help differentiate the keywords based on metrics like popularity that prove useful when assessing the value of queries and pages.

Why Should You Care About Good Website Architecture?

This helps people with visual impairments that use screen readers and visitors with unstable or poor internet connections. Describe what can be seen on the image in the alternative text. She has conducted usability research, eyetracking user research, and studies of users on mobile devices in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

In your website’s footer you can include an HTML sitemap that shows the website hierarchy to users. Navigational elements help to reinforce the hierarchy within your website architecture so search engines understand your top priority pages. But navigation also creates clear pathways for customers to achieve their goals on your site. Therefore, we could argue that navigation is one of the most important design elements on the page. But make sure you don’t create other common issues through improper implementation, such as duplicate content.

That means that the main menu shows the same labels everywhere. By following these steps, you will assign queries to your pages. Once you have the topics, the next step is dividing the information into consumable chunks – pages, based on search intent. Deliver a great user experience to your website’s visitors. Focuses on how different pages are linked together and how the content is displayed for optimal user experience.

You’re able to acquire more relevant, quality backlinks this way, too. While a good website architecture is important for presenting a great user experience, it’s also a key part of achieving SEO success. Your website’s primary purpose is to put your products or services in front of your target audience, such as your next customer or client. That means that your users should be at the heart of everything you do. Slickplan is one example, that basically organizes your web project and allows you to navigate through a visual sitemap. You can add files to each page in there, or create simple drawings and add text.

Seo Optimize Your Categories

In this article, I explain what website architecture is, why it is important, and how to create one that is good for users and your SEO efforts. I have been battling with how to categorize my posts on my own blog, and it’s been giving me headache for a while now. Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites.

Remember that you can have as many pages as you like as long as you organize them intelligently and in a way that allows users to flow through the content naturally. Take notes of what you like and what you don’t like as a user browsing your competitors’ websites. This might seem intimidating, so let’s go through the whole process of creating a great website architecture together to make it easier on you.

• Ideal Site Structure for an eCommerce WebsiteOn top of the structure we have the homepage and then the content grouped into several categories.
• 100% of your website traffic is going to use your navigation or your menu.
• Intuitive navigation features like a mega menu, filters and faceted search enable customers to quickly find what they want.
• If you already have a website that ranks in Google, one of the challenges you will face is how to change your site structure without losing your existing rankings.
• While many sites need a drop down experience, many will try to jam in ALL of the existing pages, which is NOT ideal.
• Remember, your header should just have a few top-level items for the most important content on your site, while your footer can include more “deep” links and utility pages.

Those that allow you to draw connections between pages in a way that is clear enough for a designer and developer to understand and put into practice. We usually approach website architecture once in a blue moon, meaning every couple of years when we redesign the website. Just because of that, do not succumb to the temptation of stuffing your above-the-fold view with all the VIP links.

A great website architecture should make it easy for both search engines and users to find your site’s content, and that means that pages shouldn’t be hidden deep within your site. Your website’s architecture is the way that content is grouped. This is sometimes referred to as your website’s architecture and is all about how your content is linked together and presented to users and search engines. After your homepage, your site should be divided into sections called categories.

Make Use Of Breadcrumb Menus

Categories will be out of date and will have to be replaced. Users will start valuing information that was not so relevant before. You may think that every single piece of content on your site is vital. But it’s better to accept that it is simply not true, and we need to pick our battles. At the same time, the article should point to other related articles in case more information is needed.

Seo Elements

The navigation links in your site’s footer, which typically link to “deeper” areas on your site. You can also use your site’s structure to highlight key content and nudge your site’s visitors towards the content that you want them to engage with. Creating an effective main navigation website readability menu to point people to the most important areas on your site. Once your website is launched and running, you can always use Google Analytics to ensure your site structure is working. It’s important to not go overboard with the number of items in your drop-down menu.

Consider The Depth Of Your Site’s Key Pages

And the best way to do this is by having a well-defined and solid site structure. Google has many times mentioned the need to have a breadcrumb menu on all your pages so that users can navigate the site easily. Try to think what the best grouping from a user’s perspective is. Run some scenarios and try to replicate the steps taken by users to find a product or article on your website. If you can make this process easy enough for them, then it will be for search engines too. Use a mega menu – Mega menus are a common solution for sites with extensive product lines.

A good site structure helps search engine crawlers read, index and understand your website faster and this improves your chances of ranking in search engines. Flat architecture is considered better for SEO because it helps both search engines and users navigate the site quickly. Now that we have a basic website architecture definition, let’s hop back over to our example of the ransacked department store and imagine it’s a website. How frustrating would it be to shop for men’s polo shirts on an ecommerce site without categories, breadcrumbs, filters or faceted navigation of any kind. Or, perhaps those elements are in place, but they’re not properly organized. Here’s a great example of the importance of getting navigation right.

There is a special type of markup for breadcrumbs that gives search engines more information about your navigational structure. Google can use this information to enhance the appearance of your search listing on both desktop and mobile. Link to your most important URLs frequently, especially from your homepage, your navigation and other relevant pages with authoritative backlinks. If you already prioritized backlinks, it’s time to invest in your internal linking structure. Even large, complex ecommerce sites with many subcategories can get creative with faceted navigation to maintain a flat website architecture. The header is divided into sections of the site through main menu items, and then each of the main menu items have sub-menu items so users can get to more specific content easily.

For a longer explanation, head over to our basic SEO to grow your website guide, where we’ll go in-depth and explain SEO and action steps in clear language that everyone can understand. If you have a large community, you can even start a separate support center where topics are explained and people can browse through questions. Below you see how manifestation expert Lacy Phillips does this on her community FAQ page.

Virtually every website that has more than a few pages uses some structure for organizing the content. The most common structure is to categorize pages into groups, often with distinct subgroups. The end result is a hierarchy of content, a structure familiar to most of us from our interactions with organizations, families, and the natural world. Those that gather all keywords in one place, aggregated by type and with a value assigned to them to spot what is most important easily.

If you follow the pointers in this guide, your website will be built with a sound structure and will perform better moving forward. At Missional Marketing, we’ve worked with hundreds of church websites and are experts in planning our site structure from the outset. If you’d like to have a discussion about how we can help you and your church website, get in touch with us today. A good structure can also stop you from having errors on your website that might harm your SEO. For example, it’s not a best practice to have duplicate content on your website.

If you’re unsure about the SEO impact of making changes to your website architecture, reach out to our team of experts for guidance. Tearing down your entire site structure and rebuilding it would be nearly akin to a site migration. And even the most perfect 301 redirects can’t fully offset the SEO impact of a change that large. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a conversion-ready customer due to poorly organized website architecture. It also means crawlers will spend more time trying to piece together the puzzle, which wastes crawl bandwidth.

Site Architecture: How To Build A Website That Ranks And Converts

Structure should be simple and predictable to ease user navigation. When interacting with the website, the relationship between related pages should be clear and intuitive. Orphaned pages are those that do not have any incoming links. If all pages are well defined and have a purpose, they all need to be linked to each other.