An SEO Guide to Website Structure

An SEO Guide to Website Structure

SEO best practice - Content Silos & URL Architecture
(Reading time 3 minutes, 12 sec.)

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Intro

This article will explain industry terms and explain how to structure your website to rank better in search. This post will also show you how to build great content that will help visitors find what they're looking for and avoid clicking on things they don't need to see. The content silos model, for example, will show you how to optimize your internal links to improve your overall authority online. These methods will lead to higher rankings in the search engine results and more business generated for your company.

Why Site Structure Matters

There are people out there who think that building great websites is just about getting the functional elements right. But that's not true. Site structure is very influential on the overall health of your website. So if you want to have a good site, make sure you focus on getting it right from the start.

At a base level, the structure of your website should meet these criteria:

  • Help visitors understand the information on your site quickly and easily.

  • Your visitors can move around easily with intuitive navigation.

  • Over optimisation should be avoided if it leads to a bad user experience for the visitor.


  • Websites with good structure will have a low bounce rate, and visitors will stay for a length of time. The website will have a good number of visitors or click-through rate (CTR) and be a place visitors generally find informative and enjoyable. An intuitive user interface (UI) is also a feature of a great website. All of this begins with the correct site structure.

    Content Siloing

    One effective way to structure your site is to use content silos. Each piece of content (articles, blog posts, and videos) should be developed separately and grouped in a way that allows interlinking between these pages.


    Separation of content improves both readability and search engine optimisation, but designing the structure of your site isn't as easy as it sounds. If you're blogging, you have some decisions about where your blog posts will appear on your website's home page, within related topics, and within other pages. Knowing how to structure your site can help directly with search engine optimization (SEO).



    What does an SEO expert do?

    An SEO expert creates a structure for an entire website to help search engines understand it better. Usually, this includes beginning pages and article pages with featured content. Organizing content into silos that relate to each other & uniquely interlinking them gives them more SEO power. Helping to get the best results in the search engine rankings.

    Effective siloing incorporates:

  • Keyword research to develop themes and topics in groups.

  • A hierarchical content organisation based upon target keywords.

  • Effective structure via solid menus, internal linking, and URL structure.

  • Merge pages that have content that is very similar to other pages on your website.

  • Establishing a Complementary URL Structure

    A complementary URL structure is a set of related pages on a given domain. It's a logical organisation that helps search engines crawl and index your site. Start with a sitemap, then add permalink pages that point to other related topics within the sitemap. With your hierarchy in place, your next task will be to establish a complementary keyword-rich URL structure. This helps to secure better ranking positions and ease of navigation for users.

    Internal Linking Structure

    A well-optimized internal linking structure can help you rank higher in search results. This means that you should link to relevant parts of your website or blog posts often. This helps backlinks be more reliable and sustainable because there's more competition between domains. It also helps your website to rank higher because visitors from top sites tend to be more engaged with your content than less popular sites.

    Some Key Questions

    There is much to consider when thinking about website structure. So here are some questions that you might find helpful to ask yourself as you embark on this part of your website optimisation journey.

  • Is your content optimised for relevant keywords?

  • Is your content presented logically?

  • Are you effectively leveraging content hubs and silos?

  • Do your keywords align with how your users view the subjects?

  • Have you planned for future scalability?

  • Conclusion

    Effective site structure is the product of intentional design and organisation. Like many things in SEO, establishing a good site structure starts with a detailed plan, that is best implemented by an SEO expert.

    It might not necessarily have been at the top of your list when considering how to optimise your website for SEO. I hope this guide helps to highlight the importance of website structure and convinced you that this aspect of web design can help gain ground in search engine results.

    Interested in a professional SEO service?

    When it comes to SEO, you need a team that can work magic. Above Design Digital Agency satisfies this need by providing our clients with professional and reliable services that help them to run successful and profitable SEO campaigns. We offer SEO services to suit all needs managed by professionals with years of experience in this field.

    You can call us at 089 4193296 or email at info@abovedesign.ie to know more. You can also fill our online contact form to get a free quote.

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