The Relevance Of Website Structure From An SEO Point Of View

It is now established that search engine optimization depends as much on the quality of the content, as it is on the structure that virtually holds the website together. With the World Wide Web becoming the single most important source of information the critical importance of structure has been on the rise. Today most information providing sites would agree without batting an eyelid that any attempt to sidestep the vital place of structure in the sites growth is doomed to fail.

Structure evolved gradually with the growth of the Internet and its use. A more elementary definition of structure would be what we knew as ‘internal linking’ but structure as it is viewed today, has a much larger dimension and scope. Today, a website defines its vision and objectives through its structure of which internal links are just a part.

Internal linking is the easiest SEO process that a website can undertake as it is based on the most essential aspect of the site which is to link its pages meaningfully. A structure is how the various pages relate to each other and the structure of links between these pages.

Any structure has to be designed in a way that the search engines can easily read the information held by the structure and visitors are able to easily navigate around the portal or website. For instance many e-commerce websites use a structure where the home page links to all the different categories that further link to their related sub-categories. The ranking of the pages reflected on the home page reduces as one goes further down through the pages in the sub-categories. However smaller websites link each web page to the other and this way the page rank flows more evenly throughout the site as it is smaller and easy to manage. There are other websites that use a mixture of the above two methods to spread the page rank around the site as evenly as possible.

From the perspective of a search engine, an important part of internal navigation is the anchor text that is used to link the pages together. In order to ensure that the link text is relevant to the information on the page the website must use keywords within the internal links as much as possible. This ensures the dual purpose of helping visitors understand what the site is all about while also informing the search engines about the structure of the website.