If content is the king for SEO, how we organize it is the key to increase our relevance at SERPs. How we organize the contents of our website has a direct impact on SEO and usability but also in terms web design and web programming.
When designing the structure of a website we must take into account that the priority is to provide easy access to the user to content, at the same time that allowing Google to improve web indexation.
Prior to decide the proper architecture for our website, we have to define which sections and subsections we want for our website and which ones are more or less important. Once we have done this, we should organize sections and subsection in terms of importance, get rid of those subsections considered as not relevant and only then, decide how we will connect all the sections.
In this article we will provide you with some recommendations:
Horizontal structures improve SEO
If we create a simple navigation structure, we allow Google robot to navigate and index all our pages. As many levels as we include in our urls and navigation menus, will make more difficult and slow for Google to navigate through our website and will have to dig deeper to find all relevant content. We should not have to do more than 3 clicks to access to any content of our website. The use of horizontal structures instead of vertical ones helps a lot.
A second positive impact of horizontal structures is that fewer levels are used and therefore the URLs are usually shorter. When we use many folders or / on the url, Google considers that we are hiding this content, therefore why Google should consider it relevant content.
Only one menu
The menu of the website has to be the same for all sections. This helps Google and users to get to the info easier and help us to create a good internal linking structure that improves our SEO. The use of bread crumbs helps but is not essential. The use of burger menus versions is very minimalist in terms of web design, but it is a bad choice in terms of usability and content access.
What is better? to concentrate content in just one url or several?
The answer is simple, if your content is original and of high quality, it is better to have all content in just one url so as to improve SEO. However, we will have always to consider to split content if it is too long.
How to know if we have done it well
Google will tell us whether our content organization is right for users and SEO. You have only to search your domain or name at Google and you will probably end up with a picture similar to the one located at the top of this article.
This organization should coincide with the most important sections of your website and it will mean that Google has understood you. Otherwise we will have to rethink how we are structuring the contents of our website. By the way, if you want that a particular link not to be displayed in this structure, you can always ask Google to eliminate this section through the url degradation section at Search Console. Of course, we cannot ask Google what we do want to be displayed there.
