Website Hierarchy Planning Techniques
Posted by chuckaikens - Oct 10, 2011
Websites are perceived as both a single property and a collection of individual website pages. Search engines crawl websites and must determine the inner page hierarchy along with which sections and pages of your website are most important. A solid plan for your site’s structure can substantially enhance the search engines results. Here are the most important elements that need planned when developing your website hierarchy:
Site Architecture
The first consideration is how many clicks it takes the user to get from your home page to the farthest point of your website. The lower number of clicks in the click path, the higher in priority the page is viewed by the search engines. Having a flat website with all of the links only 1 or 2 clicks away can confuse search engines as well. A flat hierarchy makes it hard for the crawlers to figure out what pages are the most important.
For a website page, the level could be also be reviewed based on the phsyical structure of the website. Website pages in the root folder could be viewed as more important than sub directories. It it recommended to have only sub folder and absolutely no more than 2 sub folders.
Developing a proper information architecture shows search engines what you consider the most important categories and website pages on your site as well as the association of these category’s pages with their parent category theme.
Navigation
One of the primary tools for establishing website structure is the template navigation that usually persists through out a website.
Only the most important URLs should be placed into the top and side navigation and the total number should be limited.
The link in the header and left navigation are usually viewed as the most important template based links with right navigation only slightly behind left. Footer navigational links are not as powerful in establishing website hierarchy and they may even be ignored as a signal by some crawlers.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb navigation shows where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located and your location within the site, while providing shortcuts to instantly jump higher up the site hierarchy. For example, a product page for a table lamp may have the breadcrumb navigation of “Home > Home Furnishings > Lighting > Table Lamps.”
The use of Breadcrumbs are very effective in creating the clues to your website hierarcy to search engines. Breadcrumbs are usually seen at the top of the page just under the main navigation. Breadcrumbs are absolutely used by Google to establish hierarchy and this discovered hierarchy is even displayed in Google search results.
Two common questions that we receive is whether the first(home) and last link(to itself) in the breadcrumb. In researching this, we have found the majority of website link the first link(home) in the breadcrumb to the home page and that the last link does not link(to itself) as that link provides absolutely no value to the user.
Other Resources
Here are a few more resources for Website Hierarchy: