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In this text, we’ll explain what the structure of your website should have and why it’s important. Your website represents you, more precisely your business, and therefore should present you in the best light as well as possible. The design, i.e. appearance itself, is very important but there are things that are more important than just a design – and these are things that are related to the concept of a website hierarchy.

Before we dig into the story of hierarchy, let’s say something about web hosting. It isn’t related to the website structure but setting up a hierarchy of your online presence without having a quality server to accompany it would mean that all the job you’ve done in web design and web development is in vain.

The moment you start looking at web hosting options, you’ll see that most providers offer things like free domain names, SSL certificates, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, etc. Sure, that’s important but how about paying attention to some other stuff that hosting, such as MySQL hosting, offers. Picking a solution based on uptime, scalability, and data security are the best criteria for opting for a specific host. In addition, MySQL hosting providers will put you at your disposal a few more tools with which your website might skyrocket, and these are: ease of use and plan customizability in accordance with your resources and performance requirements, infrastructure reliability and uptime, and backup and restoration services.

Understand How Search Engines Use URLs

Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to be able to crawl and index that content and direct users to it. Different content (for example, different in-store products), as well as modified content (for example, translations or regional variations), must use separate URLs to be displayed appropriately in search.

URLs are generally divided into several different sections: protocol://hostname/path/filename?query#fragment

Google recommends that all websites use this protocol – https:// – whenever possible. The path, file name, and query string determine which content is being accessed from your server. These three parts are case sensitive, so the FILE URL will be different from the file. The name and protocol of the host aren’t case sensitive; the upper or lower layer wouldn’t play any role there.

The fragment (in this case #info) generally identifies which part of the page the browser is coming to. Search engines usually ignore any fragment used given that the content itself is usually the same regardless of the snippet.

When referring to the home page, the slash behind the hostname is optional because it leads to the same content (https://example.com/ is the same as https://example.com). For the path and file name, the slash will appear as a different URL (signaling the file or directory), for example, https://example.com/food isn’t the same as https://example.com/food/.

Navigation Is Important for Search Engines

Website navigation is important because it helps visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster considers important.

While Google search results are provided at the page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role the page plays in the broader image of the website.

Plan Your Navigation Based on Your Homepage

All websites have a homepage (root URL), which is usually the page most often found on the website, and a place to navigate for many visitors. If your website doesn’t have just a few pages, you should consider how visitors will switch from your home page to a page that contains more specific content. It’s very important for driving traffic.

Do you have enough pages in a specific topic area to make sense to create a page that describes these related pages (for example, homepage -> related topic list -> specific topic)? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be grouped into multiple pages and subcategory pages?

Using the “Breadcrumb Trail”

Breadcrumb, or breadcrumb trail, is a series of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly jump to the previous section or home page.

Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root URL) as the first, far left link, and list specific parts on the right. Actually, the breadcrumb is a type of secondary navigation scheme. To be clear, it reveals the user’s location on a website or web app.

Create a Simple Navigation Page for Users

A navigation page is a simple page on your website that shows the structure of your webpage and usually consists of a hierarchical list of pages on your website.

Visitors can visit this page if they have trouble finding pages on your site. Although search engines will also “visit” this page and thus get good page coverage on your website, it’s mostly intended for human visitors.

Create a Hierarchy That “Flows” Naturally

Make it as easy as possible for users to move from general content to more specific content they want on your website. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and also incorporate them effectively into your internal link structure.

Make sure that all pages on your website are accessible via links and don’t require internal “search” functionality. Link to reference pages wherever possible to allow users to discover similar content.

Avoid:

• creating complex navigation websites (for example, linking every page on your website to every other page).
• cutting your content too much (because it will take a few clicks to get from the homepage, which is too much).

Use Text to Navigate

Controlling most page-to-page navigation on your website through text links makes it easier for search engines to search and understand your website.

When using JavaScript to create a page, use “a” elements with URLs as “href” attribute values, and generate all menu items when loading the page instead of waiting for user interaction.

Avoid:

• having navigation entirely based on images or animations.
• requiring the handling of script-based events or navigation plugins.

Create Navigation Page and Sitemap

Include a simple navigation page for the entire page (or the most important pages, if you have hundreds) for users. Create an XML sitemap file to ensure that search engines discover new and updated pages on your website, listing all relevant URLs along with the most recent primary content modification dates.

Avoid:

• leaving your navigation page obsolete with broken links.
• creating a navigation page that simply displays pages without organizing (for example by topic).

Show Useful 404 Pages

Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn’t exist on your website, either if they follow a broken link or type in the wrong URL. In regard to this, what can significantly improve the user experience is having a custom 404 page on a page that kindly guides users to the work page on your website.

Your 404 page should probably have a link to your home page and may also provide links to popular or related content on your website. You can use the Google Search Console to find sources of URLs that cause “not found” errors.

Avoid:

• allowing indexing of your 404 pages in browsers (check if your web server is set to give HTTP status code 404 or – in the case of JavaScript-based websites – includes a meta tag of robotic files “noindex” when non-existent pages are requested).
• blocking 404 page searches through the robots.txt file.
• giving only vague messages such as “Not found”, “404” or “no 404 page” at all.
• using a 404 page design that isn’t consistent with the rest of your website.

Simple URLs Convey Content Information

Creating descriptive categories and file names for documents on your website not only helps you better maintain your website but can also create simpler “friendly” URLs for those who want to link to your content.

Visitors can be intimidated with extremely long and enigmatic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

URLs Appear in Search Results

Remember that the URL of a document is usually displayed in Google search results, just below the title of the document. Even if URL structures are quite complex, Google won’t have any problems with searching all kinds of them, so spending time simplifying URLs is a good practice.

Use words in URLs

If you want to make it easy for visitors to view your site, use URLs with words that are relevant to the content and structure of your website.

Avoid:

• using long URLs with unnecessary parameters and session ID.
• selecting generic page names such as page1.html.
• using excessive keywords like football-balls-football-balls-football-balls.html.

Create a Simple Directory Structure

Your visitors must easily find where the content is on your website. To help them with this, use a directory structure that organizes that content well. Try using your directory structure to specify the type of content found in that URL.

Avoid:

• having deep insertion in subdirectories such as … / dir1 / dir2 / dir3 / dir4 / dir5 / dir6 / page.html.
• using directory names that have nothing to do with the content in them.

Provide One Version of the URL to Access the Document

Focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and linking your pages internally. That way, you’ll prevent users from linking to one version of the URL and others to another because this could split the reputation of that content between URLs.

Setting a redirect 301 from unwanted URLs to a dominant URL is a good solution if you realize that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs. You can also use a canonical URL or use the link element rel =“canonical” if you can’t redirect with redirection.

Conclusion

A hierarchical organization is a virtual necessity. The success of your website pretty much depends on the hierarchy. This means that every little piece of information has to be ranked in importance and organized by relevance to one of the major categories.

Once you have determined a logical set of priorities and relations in your website content and its outlines, you can build the marketing and SEO strategy because you have the most important, general concepts established which go down to the most specific or detailed topics or pages.