Contrary to popular belief, websites, or more specifically the site structure, do matter a lot to search engines though they don’t influence ranking much. The SEO services Dubai sector generally recommends an SEO-friendly site structure that complements an effective SEO strategy. 

It’s through the site structure that search engine crawlers understand the content of a website and the relationships between the website’s various subjects. Apart from site structure, content, links, multimedia optimization etc. also contribute to a website’s visibility online. 

A well-organized website makes it easier and quicker for users to find what they are looking for, while helping search engine crawlers understand the site and its purpose better. The users should not have to scroll or click for long to find topics they have been searching. 

Types of site structures

There are many but the two most common ones are flat structures and deep structures. Deep sites will have a lot of links through which users can access detailed information. Flat structures, on the other hand, will require much lesser number of clicks to find that information. 

So basically, users browsing deep sites will take a long time to find what they are looking for. This applies to crawlers as well. A flat site structure makes it easier for crawlers to index your site, and users to find information, thus increasing user engagement (theoretically).

A sensible site structure

Search engine optimization is quite intricate. An optimizer will be involved from the beginning itself – from the structuring of the website. They will have to figure out the optimal structuring approach so crawlers can understand and index the website faster. Crawlers are now capable of building semantic relationships between topics.  A good site structure directs them properly. 

For this, the content needs to be broken down in a logically sensible manner. This categorizing benefits not just the crawlers but the users as well. 

Navigation

Having a simple and easy-to-use navigation is an important trait any website should have. Before building such a navigation, you need to prepare a list of the content pages you want to have in the website, and the content that will be presented on those pages. The next step is to work your way from the top, with a navigation that holds all types of detailed content. 

Then you can start working on the sub categories of each detailed type of content. Once the top-level navigation is set, the best way is to go back to the bottom. With the top and bottom-levels ready, you can fill in the middle. This sensibly connects all top-level pages with detailed content. Other pages can now be included before building a hierarchy that shows the pages of the site and how they are connected. 

Sitemaps

Back in the days, almost every site had HTML sitemaps. Some still do. But for SEO, use XML sitemaps as they help crawlers figure out the site structure. The XML sitemap lists the URLs on the website and indicate the pages that you want the crawlers to crawl. 

The best approach is to have both HTML and XML sitemaps – the former benefiting the users and the latter benefiting search engines.