The web structure is how you organize your website content. In other words, is how you connect your posts or pages through internal links.
With a proper web architecture, you can SEO optimize your web by giving more relevance to the pages and/or keywords you are most interested in improving your rank.
In this post we are going to give you several notions about this topic taking into account:
- Fundamentals for structuring an SEO-oriented website.
- Types of web architecture.
HOW TO SEO-STRUCTURE MY WEBSITE?
What should we pay attention to achieve a good ranking of our pages thanks to the internal interlinking? We will highlight several key points:
- Establish the categories of your website with the most searched keywords (depending on the niche the amount will be more or less, around 5,000 can already be considered interesting). Use tools such as Keyword Tool, Semrush, KWFinder, or Found among many others to search for keywords or anchor texts related to those categories we desire to rank in the first place on Google.
- Select the web architecture that best fits your business: the vertical, horizontal, silo, or mixed. Consider the type of customer you have, how many clicks do you think they will be willing to do? Flatter architectures have a range from 1-3 clicks while deeper architectures are set up to 10 levels.
- Keywords with higher competition (more monthly searches) will need an extra boost to rank. Redirect links to your main URLs from posts or pages focused on other keywords of less relevance, but related to the subject matter. This will increase the strength of the most competitive words.
Optimize your URLs according to the web structure you have defined. As you can see in the image they are like subfolders. Everything you see on the right side of the URL should be boosting the improvement of the position of the left part of the URL.
As you have seen, one of the main keys is to establish a good web architecture, let’s see what alternative is the most suitable for you.
TYPES OF WEB ARCHITECTURE
The different alternatives of web architecture are used according to the distribution and connection, between pages and posts, that fit better with your business. Why or when to use one or the other? In the following lines we will answer you, but keep in mind that one of the keys to this task lies in taking links from the pages with fewer average visits to those with more visits to give more strength to these (it is more difficult to rank them because of there are a lot of people trying to position it).
NATURAL WEB ARCHITECTURE
This is the most common case, there is nothing wrong with it, but it is not SEO optimized. Here we link posts and pages according to what we think the reader might be interested in, without worrying about our website structure.
HORIZONTAL WEB ARCHITECTURE
In this case, links are connected according to the level at which that URL is, and also, as you go down to a new level, you find more keywords trying to position (the graph widens).
This web architecture is widely used in the case of websites without high specialization, dealing with topics of different categories that have a certain relationship with each other but do not have to be directly dependent.
VERTICAL WEB ARCHITECTURE
Vertical websites are those that are linked in such a way that at the lowest levels (excluding the home page) are the words with the fewest searches and from these are redirected to those that are related and have the most searches.
This structure is used on websites that deal with a niche. Unlike the horizontal layout, the vertical layout does not “widen” as you go down a level.
SILO WEB ARCHITECTURE
This is a vertical structure focused on several niches, it is ideal for e-commerce cases. The key categories are established as pillar pages and below these, related URLs or subcategories continue to intertwine (taking keywords with fewer potential searches to those with more, to give them greater strength).
MIXED WEB ARCHITECTURE
This one would be a mix of vertical and horizontal structure (allows links in both directions) but this adds a lot of complexity to a website, so apart from very specific cases, it will not be necessary to implement this one.
OUR CONCLUSIONS
Now you know the basics needed to organize your web, we leave you some final tips to close this post:
- Analyze your business and your customers when establishing one web architecture or another.
- Evaluate what level of complexity you need. Many websites with 3 levels and without a large number of categories can do a great job without excessive complications when it comes to managing the internal links of the website.
- Focus your effort on your keyword analysis. With this, you can get the categories, subcategories, and posts with related keywords. The better the analysis is, the more complete Google will consider your website so it will rank you better against other competing sites, this will give you incredible results in the long run.
- Don’t forget about the reader. Yes, we are optimizing the interlinking to optimize your ranking, but the other key factor next to this is to create content of value to the user.
If you have any questions or concerns about any of the architectures, please do not hesitate to contact us, we will be happy to answer you.
