Website structure

Over the years, as the search engines and its crawlers has evolved, the general structure of a website isn't as crucial for them to find and index the content and longer.

With that said, having an optimized and efficient site structure helps in many ways, from the crawlers to faster and more accurately find and index the content, to more efficient use of the crawl budget, to what is always most important - the usability of the website from the users' perspective.

How should the website be structured?

Most websites share a similar overall structure, which over the years has been optimized for the search engines to efficiently crawl.

For websites with a focus to be top-rated in the search engines it is important to build the site with this basic structure in mind.

Below are listed the overall website sections as described in the Google Quality Guideline Ratings.

The Main Content (MC)

The main content is the most important part of any website, and search engines spend most of its time on the website crawling and indexing the content found in the MC.

On a news’ website’s homepage, all the featured articles, lists of latest news, and relevante «daily» updated information like stock updates or «In the news» are all parts of the MC.

For a webshop website’s product page, all information describing the relevant product, including tabs, will be part of the MC. However, information like «Customers who viewed this also viewed» is typically not part of the MC, though if the product relation is something like «Recommended spareparts» it might be considered to be part of the MC.

«Relevance is key to SEO, as it gives the user more accurate data to make for example a quick decision on a purchase or to find the answer to the query.»

Reviews are typically not part of the MC, however in some occasion

The Supplementary Content (SC)

Supplementary Content (SC) gives the site an improved User eXperience (UX), but does not directly help the page achieve its core purpose.

Search engines crawls and tries to understand the structure found in the SC, which very often gives a good pinpoint on what type of content to find on the website, including the amount of content to find, e.g a navigation with many selections might be a sign of a content-savvy website.

The most common SC is the website’s navigation.

Although much of this chapter will be focusing on how to implement and optimize the various elements making up the MC, we will also cover all the important parts of the SC in order for the search engines to find its way around on the website.

Advertisements (Ads)

Without advertisements many websites wouldn’t exist, so advertisements is a natural part of many websites.

Having general ads on a website will not reduce the ranking of the website, however, websites with ads potentially misleading the user or ads promoting clearly fake information will be a very strong negative ranking signal, and even have the website being removed from most search engine’s index.

So, if the website has ads on it, make sure the ads are not promoting false or fake information to the user.

Although much of this book will be focusing on how to implement and optimize the various elements making up the MC, we will also cover all the important parts of the SC in order for the search engines to find its way around on the website.