By Emma-Julie Fox

Whenever SEO is discussed, people often talk about the choice between on-site and off-site optimization as well as the benefits of executing both. What they fail to discuss, however, is the structure of a website and this is perhaps the reason why so many people don’t recognize its importance in terms of achieving SEO success.

If you really want to succeed in online marketing, then you should realize that your site structure can influence your SEO results in a number of ways. You should therefore strive to build a site with the kind of structure that’ll usher in the kind of success you expect.

There are several ways in which you can organize your web pages. What’s important is for you to make sure you organize it in such a way as to help, rather than harm, your overall strategies for SEO.

Be sure to take guidance from current SEO trends and a reputable SEO company to increase your chances for success. Among other things, referring to SEO trends enables you to place more emphasis on links that point directly to your web pages which may be most relevant to your target audience.

If you fail to keep up with the latest SEO trends, you may inadvertently bury relevant pages within your site instead of placing them near the top to make them more searchable.

So, how exactly do you build a website structure that can help you ensure SEO success? Well, you may begin by improving on the following elements of your site:

1. URL Structure

You may already be aware of the benefit that can possibly be gained by inserting your target keywords into your page URLs. You’ll have to do some research on how you can establish the kind of URL structure that can reap SEO benefits.

In most cases, it is advisable to vary the keywords you use in the different pages of your website so as to avoid over-optimization.

Remember that Google is now is now very wary of sites and pages that are filled to the brim with recycled keywords. And where Google goes, other search engines are bound to follow.

2. Navigation

When you first establish your site, it may be easy enough to arrange your web pages and organize navigation. But, many people make the mistake of thinking that they can just insert new pages according to general hierarchies and categories as their website and their business grows.

Taking your navigation elements for granted in this manner can be one of the biggest SEO mistakes you’ll ever make! If you want your SEO results to improve, then you’ll really have to pay close attention to the entire process of putting in place your site’s navigation elements.

These days it is often more important to structure your site for users rather than for search engines. Therefore, you should focus on setting up your navigation elements such that a first-time visitor won’t find it difficult to become familiar with your website right away.

Site visitors should also be able to check out any of your pages with just three clicks or less. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should ignore search engines altogether.

You should also make sure your navigation elements are set up such that search engine crawlers can easily browse your pages.

It’s best to use XHTML or CSS-based navigation schemes, as these are much easier for search engines to crawl through than JavaScript or Flash. This increases the likelihood of your web pages being displayed in search engine results.

Another factor you need to take into consideration is the depth of your website. Remember that it is much better in terms of SEO to have a shallow site, which means a visitor will only have to click once or twice to get to any page they want to check.

A shallow site is also better from a visitor’s perspective, since no one appreciates having to go through a series of clicks just to visit a single web page.

3. Internal Links

The structure of your website’s navigation elements isn’t the only factor that allows you to control your site’s depth. In fact, it isn’t advisable to rely on navigation alone when structuring site depth. Internal linking is one effective way for you to reduce site depth; it also has several SEO advantages to boot.

Other than allowing visitors to check out individual pages with a minimum number of clicks, this strategy also allows you to utilize a keyword-rich anchor text in each of your web pages.

Furthermore, this makes visitors appreciate your site more, as it points them to additional information they may find interesting.

The good thing is that it can be easy enough to set up internal links. All you need to do is check if a reader who accesses a particular page or article on your site may find other pages or articles equally interesting. Once you find such opportunities, you just need to link the two pages.

Be sure to do this each time you create a new page or post a new article on your site. Of course, you’ll have to make sure your site’s content is relevant and you won’t waste your site visitors’ time with the internal links you set up.

SEO is indeed an essential element of any business that relies on having a strong online presence. Without SEO success, your business is bound to suffer. This is why it is important for you to learn as much as you can about using SEO. Furthermore, you need to learn how to organize your website such that you can easily overcome Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

The good news is that even if you’ve already set up your website without taking the above elements into consideration, you can still turn things around by reviewing your site and making changes as needed. You can choose to go slow and work on improving one element at a time.

What’s important is for you to consistently work on improving the structure of the site as a whole. Pretty soon, you should be able to see some amazing results.

About the Author
Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media, a Vancouver based SEO company. Pitstop Media has been helping businesses across North America successfully increase their search visibility. If you want to invite the author to guest post on your blog please contact www.pitstopmedia.com