To succeed in your natural referencing or SEO, you must necessarily spend time to improve the user experience and promote the readability of your website by search engines. Both of these results can be achieved by improving the tree structure of your platform. What does it involve? What are its advantages? What are the best practices to implement? What tools should you use? In this article, we will answer the different questions you may have about the website tree structure.
What is the tree structure of a website?
The creation of a web site is similar to building a house. You must define the base of the structure beforehand so that the other elements are harmonious and successful. Like the plan of a house, the tree structure of a platform is the organization of the different elements such as the page and the contents. By paying attention to it, you will be able to connect the pages to each other and define how your main pages allow to discover deeper pages of your website. For the creation of your platform, this is an essential step. It is also important for your organic search engine optimization.
With a well constructed tree structure, Internet users can navigate freely on your site. It also allows to indicate to search engines the important contents and those which are not. Finally, you must keep in mind that it represents the skeleton of your website. To define the tree structure of your platform, you will have several means at your disposal, namely: internal links, hierarchy, categories...
Why work on the tree structure of your website?
The tree structure of your website is an essential base that will condition its quality. Here are some reasons why you must work on it.
Organic referencing
With the keywords that you will have added for each page of your website, it automatically benefits from a much better organic referencing on search engines. When a user goes looking for information, he will find your platform if the tree structure is perfect and if the answers to his questions are presented in a relevant way.
One of the main advantages of organic referencing is that it will allow you to enhance your site and display it to Internet users, without you having to pay money. Don't forget that natural optimization is essential to avoid ending up in the last pages on search engines. This is the interest of working on the tree structure of your website.
Indexing
To have an excellent referencing on search engines, you must have a better crawl. The latter is the fact that Google's robots crawl your pages in order to index them. Here, indexing consists of inserting the pages of your website in the Google databases, according to the keywords you use.
Note that the optimization of your platform must necessarily respect some rules. If it contains a lot of keywords, the robots ignore your pages. On the other hand, if you don't put enough keywords, your pages will end up completely at the bottom of the ranking. Keep in mind that Google's robots crawl thousands of pages a day. If you have a nice tree structure, they will inevitably place you at the top of the ranking.
The evolution of the site
The tree structure of your website allows you to anticipate its evolution and plan future updates accordingly. If the structure is well defined, you will have a quality platform at all times and you will maintain its relevance to your audience.
What are the pages that usually appear in the tree structure of a website?
It is important to design the tree structure of your website before creating it. During the process, you must have in mind the pages that your platform will need. Here are the tracks to explore.
Current pages
First, there is the home page which is essential, whatever the type of website chosen. Then, we find the services. If you are a company, you must have a "Services" page to display your different services and your children pages will allow you to present a different offer. As for the "About" page, it tells more about the platform and its interest. If it's a business site, you can present the history of creation and your team.
Legal pages are very important to avoid disputes and gain the trust of users. Every website must have a privacy policy and legal notice.
When you have a lot of pages on your website, think about creating category pages. They will allow you to host a large number of children pages. If you have a blog or a media site, you should create a thematic category (well-being, health, cinema outings...). On the other hand, if you manage an online store, you must create a product category (children's clothing, women's clothing, men's clothing...)
Finally, with a high content site, the subpages can be unlimited. Depending on the type of platform you have, it will be product sheets or blog posts. Of course, the tree structure of a website is not fixed. Whether you have an e-commerce or a blog, the ideal would be to mention them throughout your structure.
Other pages
There are pages that are not common on all sites. Depending on your industry or preferences, you can create other pages. For example, a large organization can add a "Career" page to recruit new talent. In the same way, an online store can offer a customer area with a profile page.
What are the best practices for building a site's tree structure?
To promote the success of your business and to increase your online impact, the creation of your website's tree structure is an essential step. It is recommended to let a professional take care of this task, especially when you have no knowledge in the field. This will help you benefit from a quality service that will be beneficial to your natural referencing and to your annual turnover. However, if you have some knowledge in the creation of a website, here are some tips that will help you define the tree structure.
Finding the right keywords
For your business, you need to find relevant keywords. To do this, you can use online solutions such as SEMRush, Yooda Insight or YourText Guru. Start with a keyword that perfectly defines your business, products and services. From this specific term, you will get new ideas generated by the tool you are leveraging. The keywords obtained will allow you to find headings and sub-headings for the ranking of your pages.
To make the best choice, focus mainly on the monthly search volume and the competition. There are phrases that generate at least 500 queries per month and have low competition. These are the leads you should prioritize to distinguish yourself from other companies that offer the same services as you.
Inventory and organize the content of your website
For the redesign of your site, make an inventory of the existing content already on your platform. Gather them in a folder and classify them by category. If necessary, you can modify the content to be in accordance with your headings and your new keywords.
Once you have an idea of all the content you have published on your site, think about which ones you want to add. From there, make an organization in levels. Level 1 should always be your home page. Professionals recommend not to create pages that are too deep. You should not exceed three levels, but this is just a suggestion.
Study the competition and design the site structure
When you are too busy perfecting the structure of your website, you may forget some essential elements. This is why you should visit competing platforms. This will allow you to determine if you have overlooked anything. If so, think about integrating as many of them as possible to put all the chances on your side.
Next, create the structure of your site. To do this, you can choose a design on paper or on software. If you have collaborators with whom you are working on this project, it would be ideal to use a specialized tool. With software such as Balsamiq or PowerPoint, you will have excellent results.
Think about organic referencing
This step will allow you to make the last changes on your structure and to define the links between the different pages of your site. Think about all the scenarios and perform some tests. To do this, you need to think about the user profile, the objective, the acquisition channel and the landing page.
Whatever options you choose, you must ensure that the user finds the information he is looking for quickly on your page. To improve your SEO, you must make sure that the main pages stay at level 1 or 2 maximum of your tree structure. The deeper the pages are, the lower the ranking on search engines.
Mistakes to avoid when designing a web site's tree structure
Now that you know the method to follow to build the tree structure of your website, you must avoid some mistakes to get a quality structure. Here are some of them.
Deepen the levels
Increasing the depth of a page will not benefit your tree structure. There is no point in creating a page that will be too far away from the home page. To ensure that your platform meets the needs of Internet users and SEO, you should not have more than two levels of architecture after the home page.
The fact is that when a page is too deep, it receives very few visits. In order to improve your natural referencing, this is a mistake that you must not make.
Use of taxonomies
Taxonomies are the solutions offered by CMS to people who want to optimize their website. They are useful because they allow readers to find related content more easily. You have probably already seen tags, categories or labels while browsing another website.
To ensure that your tree structure is perfect, you must de-index unnecessary elements. Although taxonomies are interesting, they are not essential. Therefore, you should do without them.
How to proceed to modify the tree structure of a platform?
Several reasons can push you to change the structure of your website. It can be a migration, a reorganization of your content or an evolution of your company. The menu of your platform being the main navigation tool, you must be careful when changing it. You also need to anticipate the potential problems and fallout of your change once you've made it.
If you plan to modify the tree structure of an existing website, here is how you should proceed.
Defining the purpose of the site
The first step in modifying the tree structure of your platform is to define its objective. Here, it will be necessary to determine if it is still the same or if it has changed. You'll also need to think about the tricks you can use to achieve it. Think about the mission of your blog or online store. You need to be sure of your goals to continue with the change in the tree structure.
Inspection of available content
To begin with, you need to have an overview of the content you have. Obviously, if your platform has many pages, you don't have to list them all. They probably belong to a section or category. Think about common pages such as "Blog", "Services", "Product Categories","Product Subcategories". If you don't have any of these pages, you still need to think of a way to prioritize the existing elements.
Analysis of the existing structure
Often, the menu of a site perfectly reflects its tree structure. Indeed, if breadcrumbs and permalinks are excellent solutions, they are not favored by visitors. As for the menu, it is widely used. In most cases, it is composed of a limited number of level 1 elements. To better analyze it, you can put it in the form of a table and keep it with the list of hierarchical content that you have created.
Audit your data on the performance of sections, pages and articles that make up the menu. Get information on the volume of traffic generated. Also, analyze the elements that people like most on your homepage. This way, you will get a lead on how much information the public is looking for on your website. To improve your services, understanding your visitors is essential.
The great cleaning
After defining the purpose of your site, obtaining information about your content and analyzing your performance, you need to do a final review. This will allow you to determine which pages need to be improved or removed. There are many possibilities to explore. Think about your needs and move, merge or split sections as needed.
Should I choose to delete or update?
On your site, there are pages that need to be improved or simply deleted, because they are not in line with the new tree structure. For example, if you have abandoned some services, you need to remove them. Make a list of pages that are no longer useful to you and think about the implications of a final cleanup. Think about performance, external links to these pages and potential improvements you can make.
If your natural referencing is negatively impacted, the ideal would be to update the page. On the other hand, if the page should no longer appear on your site, delete it and redirect it to a closely related page.
Should the content be split, merged or moved?
If you find that you have a lot of similar content on a specific topic, consider merging it. Keep in mind that if you move or merge content, category or section, the URLs may change. In this case, plan for redirects.
Analysis of the navigation on the site
After changing the tree structure of your website, the way users use it is no longer the same. More importantly, the way Google will perceive your platform has changed. You need to monitor the behavior of your visitors and study Google's attitude towards the changes. To do this, don't hesitate to use specialized tools.
Web site tree: in summary
In conclusion, the tree structure of a website favors its natural referencing and indexing. Do not hesitate to modify the structure of your platform to reach your different objectives.
