How to create a great site structure for SEO | SEO for beginners

A good site structure helps both yourvisitors and Google navigate your site.

In this video, I'm going to explain to youwhy site structure is important for SEO and the basics of how to set upthe structure of your site.

Structuring your website is crucialfor both usability and findability.

Many sites lack a sound structure to guidevisitors to the product they're looking for.

You need to make sure your visitors getto where you want them to go.

Having a clear site structure also leads to better understandingof your site by Google, so it's incredibly important for your SEO.

Let's take a closer look at why structureis so important for your website.

The structure of your website has a significant impacton its User eXperience (UX).

If visitors can find the products andinformation they're looking for, it's more likely they'll become customers.

In other words, you should help themnavigate your site and a good site structurewill help with this.

Let's look at our own site, for example.

Our navigation menu is made upof no more than five items: Home, Yoast SEO plugin, SEO courses, SEO blog and support.

Everything we have to offerfalls under one of these five categories.

This keeps our menuclear and easy to grasp.

Navigating should be easy.

You need to categorizeyour posts and products so they are easy to find and new visitors instantly understandwhat you're writing about, or selling.

That's why right belowour navigation menu, you can see our most important products, followed by recent posts on our blog.

You should really take your visitorsby the hand and guide them.

Secondly, site structureis also of great importance for SEO.

A solid site structure vastly improvesyour chances of ranking in search engines.

We think there arethree main reasons for this.

First of all, it helps Google 'understand' your site.

The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about whereto find the most valuable content.

Your site's structure determines whether a search engine can understandwhat your site is about and what you're selling.

It also determines how quicklya search engine will find and index products.

In our case, our product pages, our most important blogs, and our main support pagesare featured clearly, so Google should be able to understand that our plugins and coursesare important products for us.

And the better Googleunderstands your goal, the more likely it is that it thinksyou can do a good job of helping your potential customers.

A good structure should, in conclusion, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

Thirdly, it prevents youfrom competing with yourself.

On your site, you might have blog poststhat are quite similar.

If, for example, you write a lot about SEO, you could have multiple blog postsabout site structure, each covering a different aspect.

Consequently, Google won't be able to tellwhich of these pages is the most important, so you'll be competing with your owncontent for a high ranking in Google.

You should let Google know which pageyou think is most important.

Therefore, we have createdan “ultimate guide to site structure”, which we link tofrom all our individual posts, making sure that Google knowsthat that's a page we value a lot.

Generally, the more you link to an article, the more important it is.

You need a good internal linkingand taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you, instead of against you.

And lastly, site structure is importantwhen dealing with changes on your website.

The products you sell in your shopwill likely evolve over time.

So could the content you're writing.

You will probably add new product linesas old stock sells out.

Or perhaps you thinkthe information in old blog posts shouldn't be on your site any more.

You don't want Google to showoutdated products or deleted blog posts, so you'll need to deal with these kindsof changes in the structure of your site.

You can use categories and tags in WordPress to make your site clearer to usersand search engines.

If you've not yet divided the blog posts orproduct pages on your site into categories, you should – right away.

Make sure you add these categoriesto the main menu of your site.

Each category should beabout the same size.

Adding tags will also helpyour site structure.

They are similar to categories, but there is one key difference.

Categories are hierarchical; you can have subcategoriesand sub-subcategories, while tags have no hierarchy.

Let's look at an example.

The “ultimate guide to site structure”falls under the category of “content SEO”.

This is because site structure is an elementof content SEO, just like keyword research, and copywriting.

But the article has tags too, for example”internal linking” and “site structure”.

These aren't categories: site structure does not fallunder “internal linking”.

But they are important SEO terms, and someone looking for these termswill definitely be interested in this article.

So we need to be able to connectthat term to this article.

That's why we tag the article with them.

Try not to create too many tags.

If you add a new unique tagto every post or article, you're not structuring anything.

Make sure each tag is used at least twice, and that your tags group articlesthat genuinely belong together.

Another important aspect of site structureis internal linking.

Your link structure has a direct impacton your site.

Your most important articles, so-called cornerstone articles, should link to related posts, and vice versa.

Cornerstone articles should be the articlesyou link to from many of your blog posts.

But more on these cornerstone articlesin the next video.

Because you're linking from pages that areclosely related to each other content-wise, you're increasing your site's chanceof ranking.

Linking this way will help search enginesfigure out what's important by showing themwhat's related and what isn't.

So let's review our key takeaways: 1.

Site structure is importantfor navigation.

2.

Site structure helps Googlemake sense of your site.

3.

Site structure is important to tell thesearch engines which articles are important.

4.

Site structure helps you dealwith old content.

5.

You should use categories and tagsto structure your site.

6.

Internal linking helps search engines understand what pages on your siteare important.

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