And any errors encountered along the way—like long redirect chains or 404s—exacerbate the problem. Have you ever walked into the clearance section of a large department store the week after Christmas? There are piles of clothes everywhere; tags are missing; sizes are jumbled up; departments are mashed together. As a final step to putting together a solid website architecture, consider generating an HTML sitemap. You can use the SEMrush Position Tracking Tool’s cannibalization health tool to find issues that exist and then learn how to fix them in this guide.

website structure

It’s worth taking that into account when designing your website architecture. By now, you should have your intent and queries clearly assigned to pages. The more everyday language you have on those labels, the easier it will be to find information. When sitting down to create website architecture, you should reflect on your current situation.

Church Website Site Structure: The Definitive Guidelast Updated: January 3rd, 2021

Notice that the category name is not included in the URL because It doesn’t have to be included. It’s friendlier to users and search engines to keep your urls short and precise. Google can understand the category of the article from your sitemap and breadcrumb menu and.

A good website architecture makes it easy for users to navigate between pages and search engines to crawl your content and understand what your site is about. A website shouldn’t be a random collection of pages and posts. It should be an organized collection of content that’s easy for search engines and users to navigate and understand. Following the SEO best practices when it comes to structuring your site is crucial. Drop-down menus like this can be really useful for displaying your site’s categories.

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These numbers are not a hard rule – you can add more top-level items if needed. But you don’t want to feel like you’re trying to cram in every single link on your site. Remember, you just want to help people quickly access the most important content on your site. Once you have your main parent categories, you can decide whether it makes sense to further organize your content with child categories and/or tags. Now that you’ve put all your efforts into creating a website using the essential web design elements, we need to talk Search Engine Optimization.

  • After your homepage, your site should be divided into sections called categories.
  • Essentially, it cannot be accessed from anywhere within a site and only from a direct link.
  • In your website’s footer you can include an HTML sitemap that shows the website hierarchy to users.
  • If you’re unsure about the SEO impact of making changes to your website architecture, reach out to our team of experts for guidance.
  • Your priority is still to have it in line with what human users need.

Technology that people use to access websites keeps on changing. You’ll learn how to design the perfect structure for your website. If you haven’t done an audit of your site structure yet, then this is a task to add at the top of your SEO checklist. Users should be able to reach any page of the site by following links of the homepage. In other words, the menu should display all levels until you go back to the homepage. As a result, the category page is ranking for a number of terms including SEO Articles and Latest SEO articles.

Create Files And Folders

Avoid using Javascript or Ajax when creating your navigation. The best approach to make the life of search crawlers easier to use plain HTML tags combined with CSS for formatting. Add your categories in the menu of your website and homepage. Don’t try to hide your categories but make sure that your main categories are accessible from the main menu and linked to from the homepage.

You can also use the Keyword Gap Tool to see where opportunities exist between your site and your competitors or crossover topics and keywords between two or more competitors. Enter a topic and hit ‘get content ideas’ to return a list of potential topics based on what you entered. The right website architecture helps you highlight your most important pages and position them as the pages that should rank for competitive, high-volume keywords . In this guide, you’re going to learn how to build a site structure that works and helps your site achieve SEO success. If you try and use ‘church in Phoenix’ as a keyword on every page, you harm your chances of ranking.

website structure

But if they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll be more likely to “bounce” and leave your site. Basically, even if your site offers exactly what the person is looking for, they still might leave if your site’s structure doesn’t make it easy for them to discover that content. Video tutorials Learn at your own pace with short and sweet instructional videos. Hire an expert Find approved consultants to help your business grow. Blog Read stories and how-to articles to level up your strategies. Best practices by industry Discover the best email marketing practices for your industry.

What Is A Sites Structure?

Just don’t add so many that it’s a chore to read through all the options on the top navigation. The more confusing the journey, the less likely the user is to enjoy it or to complete it. Every product or service on a large website should be in a logical place that makes it incredibly easy to find. When users get lost, reach a dead end or become confused, bounce rates and shopping cart abandonments increase. This helps search engines understand what your website is about and give context to the keywords you should be ranking for. Internal linking is a very important part of site structure, and also of SEO.

Use Proven Navigation Templates

This list will usually make up your school’s primary navigation menu. If your school site only has a few pages you can create and add your content as you build your website. That’s why we recommend planning and preparing your content in advance so you can stay organised and build your website faster. So there you have it, our comprehensive guide on church website site structure.

We love the Our Story page from haircare e-commerce company Briogeo. Matching their brand, the About page is fun and interactive. You can watch video interviews, listen to podcasts and learn about the brand’s name origins and founder story. They strategically intertwined website readability products, but in a way that feels organic. For their hero image, they use a video—a great choice since their product is video courses. Large images are mixed with smaller high-quality photos to create a web design that feels lively and interactive, like their brand.

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Identify your most valuable pages and link to them from other related pages of your website. At any point in time, these should be the pages on your website that have the greater number of internal links. One of the ways to make your site structure stronger is to make good use of internal links.

The second image clearly helps users navigate the right products as easily as possible, whereas the first one goes no deeper than top-level generic categories. For example, as we previously discussed, you could create a child category for Manchester United if you regularly cover that team. However, you might want to use tags when you write about specific players on the team because you probably don’t provide dedicated coverage for individual players .

When it comes to planning your structure on a new site, understanding the concept of one page to target a specific intent of a keyword can help you to prevent issues from happening. While navigation menus primarily exist to help your users find the pages they’re looking for; they’re a great indication of the most important pages. It helps to visually map out your site’s structure at this stage to help you to see how topic clusters fit together and where specific pages and posts should go. It makes sense to define your topic clusters, determine your pillar page for each cluster, and then expand to plan the supporting content. Use the Semrush Topic Research Toolto generate ideas around the key topics in your industry and get you thinking about the most effective way to group your content and keywords. After all, to plan a structure that works, you need to know the topics you’ll target and the primary keywords within these topics that you’re trying to rank for.

Final Tips For Church Website Site Structure

The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. In MailerLite’s user-friendly website builder, you’ll find all key analytics directly in your dashboard. Additionally, you can connect to Google Analytics and Facebook to see how people behave on your website after clicking on a paid Facebook ad. Once your website starts gaining traction, it’s good to check your analytics and see how each website page performs. This gives you insights into what engages people and which website elements can be improved.

Or, should you load more content as the user scrolls or clicks a “load more” button? Infinite scroll can be a nice way to help the user avoid clicks, making it especially helpful for mobile. However, pagination gives the user a greater sense of control.

So you want to catch people’s attention as soon as they arrive and use effective website elements to keep them engaged. A job well-done is when visitors come to your website and find exactly what they’re looking for while you keep them engaged and guide them towards the desired goal. Content is more discoverable when it’s not buried under multiple intervening layers. All other things being equal, deep hierarchies are more difficult to use. Good website architecture serves humans and bots and allows both of them to flow through your content.

Example of Sitelinks in Google Search ResultsYou cannot specify which parts of your website to be shown as sitelinks since these are automatically selected by the Google algorithm. When you have an optimized structure, you make this job very easy for them and this means better exposure. Keywords are still important for rankings but equally important is topic relevancy and one of the ways to achieve this is through a good site structure. With the introduction of artificial intelligence in the Google ranking algorithm, voice search and mobile first index, the structure of a website has gained more importance than ever. Our guide has everything you need to know about site structure optimization.

Internal links emphasize which pages are more important within your website architecture. This ensures that your site doesn’t have orphan pages, which are when a page is not linked to from anywhere within your site’s structure. Essentially, it cannot be accessed from anywhere within a site and only from a direct link. Once you’ve mapped out your site’s structure, this can make a great reference point as you build out content and continue to grow. You’ll be able to see shared keywords, unique opportunities, and more, helping to steer your keyword strategy and ensure you’re covering all your bases .

WordPress categories are a hierarchical grouping mechanism, which means you can have parent categories and child categories. Think of it kind of like nesting a folder inside another folder on your computer. If your goal is to make money with your website, this means that optimizing your site’s structure can help you boost your revenue and other key performance metrics. We find Google Analytics to be the most accessible and comprehensive analytics platform. With simple instructions, you can set it up for any website. Then you can track a wide array of performance indicators like website visitors, clicks, impressions, average time on site and conversion rates.

See how I have organized by SEO Articles category page where the most valuable posts are displayed on top of the page. Ideal Site Structure for a Small Business WebsiteNotice that you have a main category for departments and a main category for the blog with several sub-categories. For example, if you have a food blog publishing different kinds of recipes, you can create several categories based on the type of recipes i.e. Google knows when a user clicks on your listing from Google search, visits your page and then goes back to Google search without interacting with your website. The only way to get sitelinks to appear with your listing is through a good site structure.

Invent the world’s greatest cat food, save a rainforest, start a needlepoint club. Whatever it is, it’s going to need a website—that’s where we come in. Categories are hierarchical (they can have parent/child relationships) while tags are non-hierarchical . These are not the only elements that affect your site structure, but they are the most important and they’ll apply to all WordPress sites. Alternatively, you can create an email automation workflow that sends an auto-reply message explaining the longer response time.

This is so users can easily learn how to navigate through your website no matter what page they land on. Site structure is becoming an increasingly important part of church website design. There was a time when just getting a website online and adding some content was enough.

If you already have a website that it’s indexed by Google and has some rankings, then don’t start changing you site structure as this may have a negative impact on your rankings. Your hierarchy should be no more than 2 or 3 levels deep – Don’t overcomplicate your site hierarchy but keep it simple. All pages of your website have to accessible from the homepage in less than 3 clicks. There is no limitation as to the number of categories or subcategories you can create but a rule of thumb is not to create more than 3 levels of depth in your hierarchy. Information architecture refers to the structure of information.