When it comes to on-page SEO, the site’s structure plays a major role in improving the overall ranking. Many people overlook the structure of the site and only focus on very basic elements. But, the truth to be told, if you want to thrive online and improve your website’s visibility, you have to take the website’s structural architecture seriously.
In this article, we will have a look at five important factors that can affect the SEO of your website. So, let’s dive in to find and let your in-house teamwork on them. On the other hand, if your company does not have an SEO team, it’s highly recommended to hire a good SEO company and bring these needful things into consideration. Also, don’t forget to check their SEO packages as well!
1. Improving the site’s crawlability
Your website’s crawlability is among the most important things to consider while improving SEO visibility. In simple terms, the crawlability process can be defined as the process of search engine bots scanning your website and understand what your website is all about.
Better crawlability means more advantage when it comes to ranking on certain keywords and ultimately driving traffic to the website. The bots traverse from one page to another and one sub-topic to another and understand the overall flow of your website. For allowing the bots to fully crawl your site, make sure your site’s structure is organized and there are no internal linking ‘dead ends’.
This situation refers to such a page or post from which the crawler can’t traverse back to other pages. Schema.org, breadcrumbs implementation, and structured data will help in better crawlability.
2. Structure of URLs
While performing SEO, most people forget to optimize the URL structure of a website’s pages and posts. Apart from performing URL optimization, you need to focus on the overall hierarchy of URLs of your website. The best structure will be that which is easy to read and understand by both the search engine bots and users.
If you haven’t performed anything related to URLs, we recommend you to start with optimizing the URL’s format. make sure the URLs are readable, and you have used the main keywords in the structure so it will be easier for bots and users to understand.
While performing redirection, you need to be extra careful and double cross-check if all the URLs are properly mapped and there are no 404s. You can hire a professional SEO company and ask them to perform a complete site audit and also optimize the URL structure. Once the structure is properly organized, you will start noticing the improved SEO performance.
3. Proper HTTPS implementations
Search engines especially Google gives significant importance to security protocols and all the search engines consider it as an add-on for a better user experience. That is the reason, a large part of websites are already running on HTTPS.
If your website is still operating on HTTP, it’s high time to upgrade and improve the search optimization process. Having an SSL certificate brings in numerous advantages and it also helps you in establishing trust among the visitors.
On the other hand, Google sometimes warns users and prevents them from visiting a site if it’s running on unsafe HTTP. So, for better SEO benefits and gaining more traffic, ask your SEO company to integrate an SSL certificate now. As many sites will be upgrading to a new protocol which is known as HTTP/2, Google’s bots have already started crawling them from November.
4. Keyword structure throughout the site
Keywords come first whenever we talk about the SEO process and there are no second thoughts that keywords are indeed significantly crucial for your site’s better SEO. But, along with having well-researched keywords, you also need to place them correctly so that you can get the maximum benefit out of it.
Make sure the internal linking is performed in the right manner and you have maintained the right SEO juice ratio throughout the pages for maximum benefit. The right internal linking structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl through the entire site faster and index the newly updated content quickly.
5. Website’s navigation structure
Good navigation leads towards a great user experience and search engines love sites that have implemented proper paths. If a user arrives on the site and he is not just sure where to navigate next and how to interact, then the bounce rate will significantly go up and it will negatively hurt your hard SEO efforts. Ask your SEO company to perform a comprehensive audit over the site’s navigation and fix those pages that lead to nowhere and confuse both visitors and search engine bots.
These were the top five website structure factors that majorly affect SEO. Start optimizing your site with the above parameters and gain an advantage over competitors. As the algorithms keep changing frequently, it’s always a safe approach to keep your website optimized and ready for the future.
