Website menus are one of those things you take for granted — until you encounter a really bad one. In the ideal scenario, users get an instant overview of what a site has to offer, and they can reach all the important stuff with just one or two clicks. In the worst case, users end up frustrated and unable to find what they’re looking for. This post will walk you through the basics of menu design and help you understand which options will work best for your site.
Your website’s menu is important because it helps users navigate your site. Sure, sometimes a user will arrive on the page they were looking for straight from Google. But usually, your visitors will want to look at various pages on your site. Or they land on your homepage and will need to navigate to the right page from there. That’s why your menu should be available on every page, and ideally, you would even have a sticky menu. Meaning that it scrolls down with the content to make sure it’s always in view. That way it doesn’t matter where your users are: they’ll always be able to find what they need.
Besides the essential navigation function of a menu, it’s also a neat way of letting users know what your site has to offer. You can think of it like a banner on each page, saying “This is what we do”. Make the most of that opportunity!
A great site menu should include links to the most important parts of your website. So it’s up to you to figure out what to put in it. But whatever content you decide to include, it’s essential to keep your menu usable.
One of the worst things you can do is overload your menu with too many links. This will make it look cluttered, and users will need to work hard to find what they need. Depending on your choice of menu design, some of the links could end up inaccessible if you have too many. For instance, if you’re using a drop-down menu, users might struggle to access links that appear off-screen.
Do: be selective or use alternative navigation options
The best option is to be selective about what you include in your menu, but for larger or more complex sites this won’t be possible. Luckily, there are lots of other solutions to a crowded menu. One solution is to create hub pages or categories, and add these to your menu instead. Then users can navigate to the relevant category or hub, and find their way to more specific content from there.
A second solution is to add sub-menus; these are additional menu options which only appear when the user hovers or clicks on a particular menu area. Sub-menus can be handy, but they can also become cluttered and difficult to use. So if you do use sub-menus, do so in moderation.
The third option is to include a search bar as part of your navigation menu. That way, if a user can’t see what they’re looking for in your menu, they can search your site for what they need. A search bar is a great feature to include, whether your menu is too cluttered or not. But do take some time to configure your search function well, because otherwise it won’t really help.
Tip:Yoast SEO Premium includes an Algolia integration you can use to improve your site search results. Using it will help push your most important content to the top of the results. Give it a go!
It’s easy to forget about mobile users when you’re using a desktop computer to build your website. But that’s the last thing you want to do, especially when it comes to your site menu design. A menu that looks good and works well on desktop might be completely unusable on a phone or tablet. Now that more and more people are using mobile devices to go online, it’s really important to consider menu design for both desktop and mobile.
There are two options for creating a menu that works on both desktop and mobile. You could add a responsive menu with a layout that adapts to the screen size being used. Alternatively, you can create a specific menu for the mobile version of your site. Whichever solution you choose, test it out on a few different screen sizes to make sure the end result is user-friendly.
There are loads of different menu styles to choose from. Hamburger menus, drop-down menus, and sidebar menus are a few well-known examples. There are also some very abstract and creative menus out there. However, the way that you implement these styles has a big impact on the overall impression and usability.
Here are some of the more standard options:
If you have a simple website and only one or two online goals, it makes sense to opt for a minimalist menu design. For example, Behance is a ‘network for showcasing and discovering creative work’, so it doesn’t need a complicated menu. They only include 3 menu options: ‘Discover’, ‘Livestreams’, and ‘Jobs’. This lets the user focus on the search field and the creative works being displayed instead.
Some sites use a more minimalist menu style to cater to their mobile users. A hamburger menu (which looks like this: ☰) is a popular minimalist choice for mobile sites as it takes up a very small amount of screen space. For instance, on the mobile version of Joolz.com there are three simple icons to help users navigate: search, shopping cart, and a hamburger menu. Clicking on the hamburger menu expands it to show a list of their product categories. Solutions like this work really well on mobile devices.
Classic menus are probably the simplest to work with. These focus on selecting the main categories or areas of the site and use buttons with text labels to guide users to the right place. A horizontal navigation bar is the most common type of classic menu. Sometimes menus like this have a few drop-down options below the main menu items, too. WordPress.org uses a classic menu design on its desktop site. Two of the menu items have a drop-down button to show more options: ‘Support’ and ‘Get Involved’.
Another classic menu style is the sidebar. You can see this kind of menu in action on Google Maps. Usually, these kinds of menus can be opened using a hamburger menu button and closed again using the ×-button. This is a great way to offer full-screen content, as the menu is hidden most of the time.
Mega menus are a kind of drop-down menu, but instead of having a single column of links under each main menu item, there is space for multiple columns. These menus are popular with larger and more complex sites, as they offer space for many more links than other menu styles. So in theory, you can be less picky about which links to include. Right?
Well actually, this supposed benefit can be the downfall of mega menus. Even though all the links can fit in there, including too much content in your menu can be overwhelming for users. That being said, if you limit yourself to a moderate amount of menu links, a mega menu can be a great option for your site.
On asana.com you can see they’re using a mega menu with a manageable number of links below each main menu item:
An example of a very full mega menu can be found on the World Food Program desktop site. In this case, the drop-down menu shows a list of countries, so users will still be able to navigate this menu quite easily. But just imagine if all these links were about different topics. Then users would struggle to find what they need, as if they were rummaging around in a messy drawer.
Other navigation options
You can do a lot with your site menu, but it’s not the only navigation option. Many sites add extra navigation links to their site header or footer. You’ll often see options to log in or change the site language in these spaces. However, if you do choose to add footer links you must disable infinite scrolling, or your users will never be able to reach the footer.
Another possibility is to create a sitemap page that users can access. This shows a structured list of all your site’s pages. These are becoming less popular than they once were, but they can still be a powerful tool for site navigation.
Site menus and SEO
Does your site menu influence SEO? Sure it does! You’re unlikely to get a lot of internal linking benefit from adding items to your menu. But there are other ways your menu can benefit your SEO, and that benefit has to do with how users experience your site.
If users can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re likely to leave more quickly and not come back to your site again. Google can pick up on those kinds of signals. So a great menu can help your SEO, albeit in an indirect way.
As a general rule, it’s a good idea to keep your menu as simple as possible. Especially for smaller sites and those just starting up, a classic or minimalist-style menu should work great for you. If you have an enormous site you’ll need to think harder about what your users need to see, and how best to display that content.
Once you have a design you’re happy with, it won’t hurt to ask a few people to try it out and give you their feedback. If you’re really serious about making your site menu usable, you could carry out task-based user testing. Either way, make sure your website menu works for your users and provides them with a great experience!
Are you aiming for that number 1 position in the search results? And do you madly chase traffic and clicks? It’s not easy to achieve all these things on your own. Luckily, Yoast is here to help. In this post, we’ll talk you through optimizing your post in the best possible way. We’ll explain the five steps on how to Yoast your post.
Writing comes first, Yoast comes second
Optimizing your post is important, but it should never come first. Writing has three phases:
Prepare your content
Write!
Edit your content (and Yoast it!)
It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a blog post, an article, or novel. The steps are all the same.
Preparation is key
Before you start writing an article, you should be able to answer the following questions:
In other words, you should take some time to think about what you want to tell your audience and what the structure of your text will look like. You need to know who you’re writing for and what their goal or search intent is. And what keywords does your audience use, so your content can be found in the search engines?
If you do not think about these questions long and hard, you’ll make mistakes like addressing the wrong audience, focusing on the wrong keywords or writing an article that’s badly structured and unfocused.
Write!
After thoroughly preparing your blog post or article, you can start writing. Make sure to start by filling out your focus keyphrases and their synonyms. What are the terms you want to be found for?
Since you’ve thought about what you’ll write in the preparation phase, you should go with the flow when you’re writing. Don’t overthink. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You’ll have the third – and most important phase- to correct and Yoast your post.
Editing: let’s Yoast it!
In the final editing phase, you can Yoast your post. So, let’s look at the five steps you should take to optimize your post to the max.
Make sure your text is readable
The first step in optimizing your post is checking the readability analysis. If your overall readability score is green, you’re good to go. But that’s not always the case! Perhaps you used too many long sentences. Maybe you’ve used the passive voice too often. Correct those readability issues and make your text nice and easy to read. Check out our article about the readability analysis for more tips!
Check out your snippet preview
You want people to click on your site in the search result pages. You need to write a kickass meta description to make your result stand out. Because a good meta description lets people know they’ll find what they’re looking for on your site! That’s why you should choose a title and a meta description that stands out. Read our article on how to use Yoast SEO to write an awesome meta description if you want more practical tips.
If you need more help writing awesome meta descriptions, try the meta description generator. Our AI-powered generator crafts unique descriptions and titles for you! This feature is currently available if you have our premium Yoast SEO plugin.
Check your SEO score
The third step is to check out the SEO analysis. Which aspects of your SEO need improvement? Perhaps you should use your keyword or its synonym more often. Or maybe you’re overdoing it. And what about headings and images?
Check out which problems and improvements the Yoast SEO analysis indicates. Usually, you can easily make some tweaks that’ll make your copy better optimized for search engines. But don’t overdo it! You do not need all green traffic lights. You’re good to go if your overall SEO traffic light is green!
Add those internal links
Another thing you need before your content can rank is links. Google finds your posts and pages best when linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. So, using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO!
Are you linking to your most important articles? Are you linking to articles that are closely related to the article you’re currently writing? Make sure your site structure is tip-top. Read more about the power of internal linking and why you should use Yoast internal linking.
Read and reread!
Yoast SEO is a tool that aims to help you optimize your content. It gives practical tips on what you can do to improve your content. Think of it as your personal SEO assistant! But that being said, it’s also just a tool. Make sure to re-read your content once you’ve optimized it to make sure you’re happy with the end result!
Yoast your post
Writing is hard. Optimizing your post all by yourself is hard. That’s why Yoast SEO tries to make it easier for you! We’ll check your posts for readability, paragraph length, word complexity, your use of inclusive language, and make suggestions for improvements. We’ll help you to Yoast your post. But in the end, it will also remain some work from your side.
Your site needs to have a defined structure because, without it, it’ll just be a random collection of pages and blog posts. Your users need this structure to navigate on your site, to click from one page to another. Google also uses the structure of your site to determine what content is important and what is less relevant. This guide tells you everything you need to know about site structure.
Table of contents
What is site structure, and why is it important?
Site structure refers to organizing and arranging a website’s pages and content. It defines the information hierarchy within the site and serves as a roadmap for search engine crawlers. A well-structured site facilitates easy navigation, enhances user experience, and helps search engines like Google understand and effectively index the site’s content. This, in turn, can improve the site’s performance by making it easier for users to find and engage with the content. Ultimately, an optimized site structure helps achieve higher rankings, more traffic, and better conversion rates.
Importance for usability
The structure of your website significantly impacts the experience for your visitors (UX). If visitors can’t find the products and information they’re looking for, they’ll not likely become regular visitors or customers. In other words, you should help them navigate your site. A good site structure will help with this.
Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize and link your posts and products so they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to grasp what you’re writing about or selling instantly.
Importance of your site structure for SEO
A solid site structure vastly improves your chances of ranking in search engines. There are three main reasons for this:
a. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site
The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. It helps search engines understand what your site is mainly about or what you’re selling. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly. A good structure should, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.
b. It prevents you from competing with yourself
On your site, you might have blog posts that are quite similar. If, for example, you write a lot about SEO, you could have multiple blog posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. Consequently, Google won’t be able to tell which of these pages is the most important, so you’ll be competing with your content for high rankings. You should let Google know which page you think is most important. You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this, so all those pages can work for you instead of against you.
c. It deals with changes on your website
The products you sell in your shop will likely evolve. So does the content you’re writing. You probably add new product lines as old stock sells out. Or you write new articles that make old ones redundant. You don’t want Google to show outdated products or deleted blog posts, so you need to deal with these kinds of changes in the structure of your site.
Are you struggling with setting up your site’s structure? Don’t know the best strategy to link from one post to another? Check out our Site structure training, part of the Yoast SEO academy. Access to Yoast SEO academy is included in the price of Yoast SEO Premium. Before you know it, you’ll be able to improve your rankings by creating the best structure for your site!
How to set up the structure of your site
So, how do you construct a solid site structure? First, we’ll look at an ideal site structure and then explain how to achieve this for your site.
What’s an ideal site structure?
Let’s start by looking at an ideal situation: How should you organize your site if you’re starting from scratch? We think a well-organized website looks like a pyramid with several levels:
Homepage
Categories (or sections)
Subcategories (only for larger sites)
Individual pages and posts
The homepage should be at the top. Then, you have some sections or category pages beneath it. You should be able to file your content under one of these categories. You can divide these sections or categories into subcategories if your site is larger. Beneath your categories or subcategories are your pages and posts.
An ideal site structure looks like a pyramid. On top, you’ll find the homepage and, right below, the main sections or categories, possibly followed by subcategories. On the ground, you’ll find all the individual posts and pages.
Your homepage
On top of the pyramid is the homepage. Your homepage should act as a navigation hub for your visitors. This means, amongst others, that you should link to your most important pages from your homepage. By doing this:
Your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on;
You show Google that these pages are important.
Further down this article, we’ll help you determine which pages are essential to your business.
Beware not to link too many pages from your homepage, which will cause clutter. And a cluttered homepage doesn’t guide your visitors anywhere. If you want to optimize your homepage further, you can do many other things. Read our article on homepage SEO to find out what.
Navigation
In addition to having a well-structured homepage, it’s also important to create a clear navigation path on your site. Your site-wide navigation consists of two main elements: the menu and the breadcrumbs.
First, let’s take a look at the menu. The website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website, and you want to make the best possible use of it. Visitors use your menu to find things on your website. It helps them understand the structure of your website. That’s why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage.
Furthermore, putting everything in just one menu is not always necessary. If you have a big site with lots of categories, this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site. Where it makes sense, creating a second menu is perfectly fine.
For instance, eBay has one menu at the top of the page – also called the top bar menu – and, in addition to that, a main menu. This top bar menu links to important pages that aren’t categories in the shop, like pages that relate to the visitor’s account on the site. The main menu reflects the most important product categories on eBay.
eBay has multiple ways to start navigating from the homepage
Finally, just like on your homepage, you shouldn’t add too many links to your menu. They will become less valuable for your users and search engines if you do.
Adding breadcrumbs to your pages can make your site’s structure even clearer. Breadcrumbs are clickable links, usually at the top of a page or post. Breadcrumbs reflect the structure of your site. They help visitors determine where they are on your site. They improve your site’s user experience and SEO, as you can read in our guide on breadcrumbs.
You can use one of the many breadcrumb plugins for your WordPress site. You can also use our Yoast SEO plugin, as we’ve implemented a breadcrumb functionality in our plugin as well.
Taxonomies
WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content; other CMSs have similar systems. The word ‘taxonomy’ is a fancy term for a group of things — website pages, in this case — that have something in common. This is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic can find similar articles more easily. You can group content in different ways. The default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags.
Categories
You should divide your site’s blog posts or products into several categories. If these categories grow too big, you should divide these categories into subcategories to clear things up again. For example, if you have a clothing store and sell shoes, you can divide this category into subcategories: ‘boots’, ‘heels’, and ‘flats’. These subcategories contain products, in this case, shoes, of that specific type.
Adding this hierarchy and categorizing your pages helps your user and Google make sense of every page you write. Add your main categories to your site’s menu when implementing your category structure.
Your site’s structure will also benefit from adding tags. The difference between a category and a tag mostly concerns structure. Categories are hierarchical: you can have subcategories and even sub-subcategories. Tags, however, don’t have that hierarchy. Tags say: “Hey, this article or product has a certain property that might interest a visitor.” Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index. A tag for the online clothing store mentioned above could be a brand, for instance, Timberlands.
Try not to create too many tags. You’re not structuring anything if you add a new unique tag to every post or article. Ensure each tag is used at least twice, and your tags group articles that genuinely belong together.
Some WordPress themes display tags with each post, but some don’t. Ensure your tags are available to visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of your article or in the sidebar. Google isn’t the only one that likes tags: they are useful for visitors wanting to read more about the same topic.
Site structure is all about grouping and linking the content on your site. Until now, we mostly discussed so-called classifying links: links on your homepage, navigation, and taxonomies. On the other hand, contextual links are internal links within the copy on your pages that refer to other pages within your site. For a link to be contextual, the page you link to should be relevant for someone reading the current page. If you look at the previous paragraph, for instance, we link to a post about tagging, so people can learn more about it if they’re interested.
Your most important pages are often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site, so you’ll link to them most often. Just remember that not only the page you’re linking to is relevant, the context of the link is important as well.
Google uses the context of your links to gather information about the page you’re linking to. It always uses the anchor text (or link text) to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. But the anchor text isn’t the only thing Google looks at. Nowadays, it also considers the content around the link to gather extra information. Google is becoming better at recognizing related words and concepts. Adding links from a meaningful context allows Google to value and rank your pages properly. Yoast SEO Premium makes internal linking a breeze by automatically suggesting relevant content from your site to link to.
Contextual linking for blogs
For blogs, you should write extensively on the topics you want to rank for. You should write some main articles — your cornerstone articles — and write various posts about subtopics of that topic. Then link from these related posts to your cornerstone articles and from the cornerstone articles back to related posts. In this way, you’ll ensure that your most important pages have both the most and most relevant links.
The following metaphor might help you understand this principle:
Imagine you’re looking at a map of a state or country. You’ll probably see many small towns and some bigger cities. All towns and cities will be interconnected somehow. You’ll notice that small towns often have roads leading to the big cities. Those cities are your cornerstones, receiving the most links. The small towns are your posts on more specific topics. Some roads (links) lead to these smaller towns, but not as much as the big cities.
Contextual internal linking works differently on an online store with very few to no pages that are exclusively meant to inform. You don’t explore a specific topic on your product pages: you’re selling a product. Therefore, on product pages, you mostly want to keep people on a page and convince them to buy the product. Consequently, contextual linking is far less prominent in this context. You generally shouldn’t add contextual links to your product descriptions because it could lead to people clicking away from the page.
There are just a couple of meaningful ways of adding contextual links to the product pages for your ecommerce SEO:
link from a product bundle page to the individual products
a ‘related items’ or ‘compare with similar items’ section
a ‘customers also bought’ section
a ‘product bundles’ or ‘frequently bought together’ section.
Landing pages are the pages you want your audience to find when they search for specific keywords you’ve optimized for. For instance, we want people who search for ‘free SEO training’ to end up on the page about our free training called ‘SEO for beginners’. You need to approach the content of your most important landing pages differently than your regular pages.
Here, we’ll discuss two types of landing pages: cornerstone pages and product landing pages. They’re both pages you’d like people to land on from the search engines, but they require quite a different approach. But first, we’ll shortly go into search intent because you have to know what your audience is really looking for.
Search intent
When setting up your site structure, you must consider search intent. It’s about what you think people are looking for when they enter a query into a search engine. What do people want to find? And: what do they expect to find?
Consider different possibilities in search intent, as you might want to cater to different types on your site. Are people just looking for an answer to a question or a definition? Are they comparing products before purchase? Or are they intending to buy something right away? This is often reflected in the type of query they make. You can also use Google’s search results to create great content that fits someone’s needs.
When you have an idea of the search intent, ensuring your landing page fits your audience’s search intent is essential. Pages can answer multiple search intents, but you need a clear view of at least your most important pages.
Cornerstone articles are the most important informational articles on your website. Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic; their main goal is not to sell products.
Because of this focus, we usually think of blogs when discussing cornerstone content. Of course, that doesn’t mean it can only be a blog post. All different kinds of websites have cornerstone articles! Rule of thumb: if an article brings everything you know about a broad topic together, it’s a cornerstone content article.
Product landing pages significantly differ from cornerstone articles. The latter are lengthy, whereas product landing pages shouldn’t be that long. Rather than complete articles, they should be focused. These pages only need to show what your visitors need to know to be convinced. They don’t need to hold all the information.
You want to rank with these pages, meaning they need content. Enough content for Google to understand what the page is about and what keyword it should rank for. Where cornerstone articles could be made up of thousands of words, a couple of hundred could be enough for product landing pages. The main focus of the content should be on your products.
Structuring or restructuring your content doesn’t always have high priority in everything you have to do. Especially when you blog a lot or add other content regularly, it might feel like a chore. Although it isn’t always fun, you must do it, or your website might become messy. To prevent that from happening, you need to fix your site structure and keep an eye on it while adding new content. Site structure should be part of your long-term SEO strategy.
When your business goal or website changes, your menu must also change. Planning things visually will pay off when you start thinking about restructuring your site. Make a flowchart.
Start with your new menu one or two levels deep and see if you can fit in more pages you have created over the years. You’ll find that some pages are still valid but don’t seem relevant to your menu anymore. No problem, just be sure to link to them on related pages and in your sitemaps so that Google and your visitors can still find these pages. The flowchart will also show you any gaps in the site structure.
Creating an overview of your categories, subcategories, and products or posts will also help you to rethink your site’s taxonomy. This could be a simple spreadsheet, but you can use more visual tools like LucidChart or MindNode.
Do your product categories and subcategories provide a logical overview of your product range or your posts and pages? Perhaps you’ve noticed somewhere down the line that one category has been far more successful than others, or you wrote many blog posts on one subject and very few on others.
If one category grows much larger than others, your site’s pyramid could be thrown off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories. But, if some product lines end up much smaller than others, you might want to merge them. Don’t forget to redirect the ones you delete.
If you have built your HTML sitemap manually, update that sitemap after changing your site structure. In the far more likely event you have an XML sitemap, re-submit it to Google Search Console.
You might be able to update and republish some outdated articles to make them relevant again. If an article is outdated, but no one reads it anyway, you might delete it. This could clean up your site nicely.
What you should know, in that case, is that you should never delete a page or article without thinking. If Google cannot find the page, it serves your user a 404 error page. Both the search engine and your visitor will see this error message saying the page doesn’t exist, and that is a bad experience and, thus, bad for your SEO.
Be smart about this! You need to redirect the URL of the page you’re deleting properly so your user (and Google) lands on a different page that is relevant to them. That could even improve your SEO!
Got some old content to clean up on your site? Sort out hidden pages and dead ends in four easy steps with our orphaned content SEO workout, available in Yoast SEO Premium.
Avoid keyword cannibalization
Your website is about a specific topic, which could be quite broad or rather specific. While adding content, you should be aware of keyword cannibalization. If you optimize your articles for keywords that are all too similar, you’ll be devouring your chances of ranking in Google. If you optimize different articles for similar key terms, you’ll be competing with yourself, making both pages rank lower.
You’ll have some work to do if you suffer from keyword cannibalization. In short, you should research the performance of your content and probably merge and redirect some of it. When merging posts, we recommend creating a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with the free Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This allows you to work on your merged post without making these changes to a live post. Read the guide by Joost to learn more about keyword cannibalization and how to fix it.
Internal linking with Yoast SEO
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this advice? Yoast SEO has some handy tools to make internal linking so much easier.
Yoast SEO’s text link counter visualizes your links so you can optimize them. It shows the internal links in a post and the internal links to a post. This tool can enhance your site structure by improving the links between your related posts. Make sure your cornerstones get the most (relevant) links! You can identify your cornerstones by finding them in the column with the pyramid icon.
Quickly see which posts have internal links pointing to them with the text link counter in Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO Premium helps you with your internal linking as well. Our internal linking suggestions tool will show you which articles are related to the one you’re writing, so you can easily link to them: just by dragging the link into your editor!
The internal linking suggestions even include other content types
Moreover, our tool allows you to indicate which articles you consider cornerstone content on your site. Those articles will be shown at the top of the internal linking suggestions. You’ll never forget to link to them again.
As we have seen, there are several reasons why site structure is important. A good site structure helps both your visitors and Google navigate your site. It makes it easier to implement changes and prevents competing with your content. So use the tips and pointers in this guide to check and improve your site structure. That way, you’ll stay on top and keep your website from growing out of control!
Want to improve your site structure but don’t know where to start? Get Yoast SEO Premium and get loads of helpful tools and guidance, including free access to Yoast SEO Academy, our Site structure training, and our SEO workouts!
Marieke is the head of strategy at Yoast and founder of Yoast SEO academy. She loves coming up with new ideas and products to make SEO attainable for everyone, and ensure a healthy growth for Yoast!
Site structure is a vital aspect of your SEO strategy. Why? Because the structure of your website shows Google which pages of your site are most important. This means you can influence which content will rank highest in the search engines with your site’s structure. And good news: You can start improving your site structure today! In this post, you’ll read why site structure helps SEO, and we’ll give you three quick tips on how to start improving it.
What is site structure?
Site structure refers to how you organize your website’s content. In other words: the pages and posts on your website. These often have a variety of – related – topics, and site structure deals with how this content is grouped, linked and presented to the visitor. You can use taxonomies, like categories and tags, but also internal links, your navigation, and breadcrumbs as tools to improve your site structure. If you do this well, your users will find their way around your website more easily. Plus, Google can index your URLs better!
Learn how to do this well. Our site structure training teaches you how to set up the best site structure for your visitors and Google!
As your site grows, it’ll get cluttered
As you’re writing more blog posts or add more product pages, your site will get cluttered. You need to organize it neatly to make sure that you, your visitors, and Google will be able to find what they’re looking for. But why is that? Well, let me tell you a little story.
Once upon a time, there was this young woman. Her name is Alice. Alice gets up every morning, sits down at her desk and starts to write a beautiful story. She writes one story every day. Alice types all her stories on this beautiful old-fashioned typewriter. Whenever she’s done writing, she pulls the paper out of the machine and puts her lovely new story on her desk. As you can imagine, her desk will slowly get cluttered with all these sheets of paper. After a year of writing, she’ll have 365 sheets of paper on it. After three years of writing, she’ll have more than a thousand. Alice will not be able to find her favorite story, because of the abundance of stories on her desk.
Conclusion: If you don’t structure your stuff neatly, your stories, blog posts and product pages will get lost. In addition, your visitors won’t be able to find what they’re looking for, and Google will also get lost (which is bad for your SEO).
Why is site structure important for Google – and users?
There are three reasons why site structure is important for Google and, therefore, your chance of ranking in the search engines.
1. Structure is a guide for Google
The way your site is structured will give Google clues about where to find the most essential content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about and what you’re selling.
Google crawls websites by following internal and external links, using a bot called Googlebot. By following those links, Google determines the relationship between the various pages. In other words: Your site structure is like a guide to Google, and therefore very crucial.
2. Not competing with your content
You probably have blog posts or articles on your site that cover the same topic. At Yoast, for example, we write a lot about SEO. We have multiple posts about site structure, each covering a different aspect. But Google won’t know which of these is most important unless we ‘tell’ Google.
A good tip is to order your content by importance. Think about Alice’s cluttered desk. She could clean up by making piles of her sheets of papers. She could order her stories by topic: bumble bees, flowers, and fairies. But, if Alice were to make these piles without any kind of structure and without putting the most beautiful stories at the top of the pile, no one would ever know which story is most important to her.
In conclusion: If you don’t tell Google which posts are most important, all of your posts will be competing for attention. You’ll be competing with your own pages for a high ranking in Google. Luckily, the solution is rather simple: Let Google know which page you consider to be the most important. To do this, you need a good internal linking structure.
3. Site structure is important for UX
Did you know that your site structure is also important for your User eXperience (UX)? After all, when people can easily find their way on your website, they’ll have a better browsing experience. This will also increase your chances for people to convert: buy your products; subscribe to your newsletter or return for another visit. And Google likes sites that perform well too! So make sure your site structure is reflected in the navigation of your website.
How to get started with site structure
What do you need to do to improve your structure? And what can you do to avoid your site structure becoming an issue? Read on for three basic tips on how to quickly improve your site structure.
1. Remove old content
Lots of shops sell a different collection of products (clothes, shoes, etc.) every season. And when the season is done, the item pages are removed. This is a great practice if you don’t expect to sell the same product again. But what about all the links that point to the deleted product page? As you know, links to your page are valuable for your SEO! That’s why you should redirect the URL. This way, you still benefit from the links, even though the page doesn’t exist anymore.
2. Evaluate your categories
You should ensure that categories are about the same size. Think of Alice and her stories. Alice could categorize her stories by making piles. Now imagine one of these piles becoming huge, while the others remain much smaller. It would be hard to find a specific story in that big pile, while it would be much easier to search through a small pile. At the same time, that big heap is probably very important, because Alice wrote a lot of stories about that specific topic.
Categories can become too large when you write a lot about one specific subject and less about others. At some point, you should divide the big category into two smaller categories. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that no category is more than twice the size of any other category. When one category is significantly larger than other ones, your site becomes unbalanced. You’ll have a hard time ranking with blog posts within a huge category. The pile has become too large to search through. In this case, you should evaluate and optimize your categories; perhaps merge or split some of them.
3. Improve your internal linking structure
You should link to the most essential content on your site to show Google that these are your best and most complete articles. But it makes sense to users too. You want them to read your best posts, right? Read Meike’s blogpost about Internal linking for SEO to learn how to improve your internal linking structure.
Yoast SEO premium can really help you set up and improve the structure of your site. The redirect functionality will allow you to easily redirect pages you deleted (so you’ll pass on the linking juice to another page). And our related links functionality will make sure you are interlinking articles with similar topics.
On top of that, we have a site structure training. This can be especially helpful if you need some guidance when starting with site structure. This training will guide you through the process. So, take a look!
Conclusion: Get started with improving your site structure
It’s important to remember that site structure is part of a bigger, ongoing process. Your site will grow and therefore, the structure will require maintenance. Improving and maintaining the structure of a site should be a core aspect of every SEO strategy. It’s a very actionable part of SEO, because it’s something you can control and improve rather quickly. So, let’s get started!
Marieke is the head of strategy at Yoast and founder of Yoast SEO academy. She loves coming up with new ideas and products to make SEO attainable for everyone, and ensure a healthy growth for Yoast!
Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your posts and pages best when they’re linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to provide the most important pages and posts with more link value than other, less valuable pages. So using the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO! In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of internal linking, how to approach it and how Yoast SEO can help you with internal linking.
An internal link is any link from one page on your website to another page on your website. Both your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate through your site and to find the content they want to find. Search engines also use links to navigate your site. They won’t see a page if there are no links to it.
There are several types of internal links. In addition to links on your homepage, menu, post feed, etc, you can also add links within your content. We call those contextual links. Contextual links point your users to interesting and related content. Moreover, they allow search engines to find out what content on your site is related and determine its value. The more links a significant page receives, the more important it will seem to search engines. Therefore, good internal links are crucial to your SEO.
Internal links vs external links
Every website — even online stores — consists of internal and external links. Internal links connect pages and posts on your website, and external links connect your pages to other websites. In this post, we focus on internal links and what they mean for SEO. See our posts on link building if you want to get more external links pointing to your site.
Why are links important to Google?
Internal linking is an essential factor for Google and other search engines. But why? And where do you start?
As Marieke explains in the video, Google follows links to discover content on websites and to rank this content in the search results. If a post or page gets a lot of links, this is a signal to Google that it’s an essential or high-value article. This counts for internal as well as external links.
Internal linking is something you control as a site owner. With the correct internal links, you’ll guide your visitors and Google to your most important pages. Our internal linking tool (not available yet in Yoast SEO for Shopify) can help you suggest related posts to link to!
Internal links establish relationships between content
Google crawls websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot called Googlebot. This bot arrives at the website’s homepage, renders the page, and follows the first link. By following links, Google can work out the relationship between the various pages, posts, and other content. This way, Google finds out which pages on your site cover a similar subject matter.
For example, you’ll see links to the ‘Content SEO’, ‘Internal linking’, and ‘Site structure’ tags on top of this post. We make sure Google understands that the content on those pages is related to the content of this post by adding these links.
Internal links help search engines better find your content
As websites nowadays grow in size and complexity, orphaned content becomes an issue for a lot of them. Orphaned content refers to pages on your website that have no internal links pointing to them. This is an issue because, without any internal link to lead the Googlebot to these pages, search engines can’t find and index them.
Even though websites nowadays have sitemaps that list the URL of (most of the) pages on your site, search engines may take a long time to eventually reach these pages. This is especially true for very big websites that take a lot of resources to crawl, or newly created sites that don’t get visited often by Google. By adding internal links to your newly published pages, you provide search engines with more ways to reach those content.
Link value
In addition to understanding the relationship between content, Google divides link value between all links on a web page. Often, the homepage of a website has the most significant link value because it has the most backlinks. That link value will be shared between all the links found on that homepage. The link value passed to the following page will be divided between the links on that page, and so on.
Therefore, your newest blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage instead of only on the category page. And Google will find recent posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage.
When you get the concept that links pass their link value on, you’ll understand that more links to a post mean more value. That’s because Google deems a page that gets lots of valuable links as more important, you’ll increase the chance of that page ranking.
Setting up an internal linking strategy
It’s crucial for your site’s SEO to evaluate and improve your internal linking strategy regularly. It’s one of the ways to improve the fitness of your website. By adding the right internal links, you make sure Google understands:
the relevance of pages;
the relationship between pages;
and the value of pages.
To set up your internal linking strategy, there are several things to take into account. How you go about it exactly, of course, depends on your site and your goals, but the following steps are a good rule of thumb.
1. Determine the ideal structure for your site
We always advise website owners to imagine their website as a pyramid. On top of it is your homepage; below that there are some sections or categories, and further down, there are individual posts and pages (possibly with subcategories in between).
If you do it well, your website’s menu should reflect this structure. In our Ultimate guide to site structure you can read how to create the best site structure for your site.
2. Decide what your most important content is
Then, you should determine what your most important content is. If you’re not sure, please read our article on cornerstone content. In short, it’s your best and most complete content; it’s about the core of your business. It’s the content you want people to find when searching for topics or products you specialize in.
Because you want to let Google know that this is your most important content, you need to add many links to it. There are various spots from where you can link to your cornerstone content. Here, we’ll give the most common options, from your post’s copy to your navigation.
3. Add contextual links
When you’ve written various articles about a certain topic, you should link them with each other. This will show Google – and your users – that those articles are topically related. You can link directly from sentences in your copy or add links at the end of your post.
Moreover, you want to show Google which articles are your cornerstone: your most complete article on this topic. You have to add a link to the cornerstone in all of the articles on this topic to do so. And don’t forget to link back from the cornerstone to the individual posts.
Contextual linking: an example
On our blog, there’s a cornerstone content article called ‘The ultimate guide to keyword research’. This post will rank for all related search queries about [keyword research] in Google search results.
So we’ve added links from other relevant articles, such as ‘7 keyword research mistakes to avoid‘, ‘ What is keyword research‘, or ‘Focus on long tail keywords‘ to the main article. And we link back from the main article to these posts. In doing so, Google will understand that the ultimate guide contains the most information about [keyword research]. So, in the end, Google will rank the ultimate guide above the other, shorter posts about keyword research.
4. Link hierarchical pages
If you have hierarchical pages on your website, link parent pages to their child pages and vice versa. Also, don’t forget to link sibling pages to each other. These pages should be related to each other on a well-organized site, and connecting them like this make perfect sense.
There are many plugins and modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. This is a good way to show your posts to more visitors. If you use one, we recommend testing whether the related posts actually are related posts. If you’re not sure, linking to posts manually is probably best. That’s what we do on Yoast.com – we select a related post manually (or with a little help from our internal linking tool – more on that later) and place a link to that post at the bottom of the article.
Besides linking from topically-related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation menu. You should do this with the posts and pages that are most important to your business. This will give these posts or pages a lot of link value and makes them stronger in Google’s eyes.
7. Add links to your taxonomies
Taxonomies, like categories and tags, help you organize your site and help users and Google to understand what your content is about. If you have a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies that the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google understand your blog’s structure and helps visitors to navigate to related posts more easily.
A good practice to do after you publish a post or page is to link to that newly published post from other content on your site. Of course, the posts or pages that link to the recently published post must be of a similar topic. You shouldn’t just link to this new post from a random post or page on your site
Now, this might sound like a daunting task, especially if you regularly publish content. But it’s worth the hassle, as you won’t end up with a bunch of orphaned content that needs fixing. Besides, adding internal links to your most recent posts ensure that search engine crawlers can crawl and index them when they land on other pages on your site.
9. Consider adding links to popular posts
The last option to mention is creating internal links to your website’s most popular posts or pages. Preferably create these sections in the sidebar or the footer of your website to have them appear on all pages and posts. As link value passes to these most popular posts from many different pages, they get a boost. Besides that, the posts will be easier for visitors to access, which will increase traffic – and more traffic is a positive sign to Google.
More on internal links
Nofollow links
You also probably have links that aren’t important for SEO on your website. If you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, for example, you don’t want to leak link value to your login page – that page doesn’t need to rank high in the search results.
You used to be able to prevent losing link value to unimportant links by giving them a nofollow tag. A nofollow tag asks Google not to follow the link, so no link value is passed on. Now you might think: “I’m going to nofollow less important links to give the most important links more link value.” While this worked in the past, Google has become more competent. Now it seems that the link value for those nofollow links doesn’t automatically flow to the other links on the page. The nofollow link will be counted as a link and the link value for that link will be lost. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of nofollowing some of the links.
Note that adding a nofollow tag doesn’t mean that those target pages can’t be found in Google’s search results. If you don’t want pages or posts to show up in the search results, you should also give them a ‘noindex’ tag. The noindex tag means that Google shouldn’t render the page and shouldn’t give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.
Once you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, it’s important to use the right anchor text. The anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see. For example, the anchor text of the two internal links in the example below are ‘link schemes’ and ‘paid links’:
You can see the anchor text containing the link in this image.
If you over-optimize anchor text you might hurt your website. By over-optimizing, we mean keyword stuffing. Previously, you could give all anchor texts the same keyword and Google would rank your site higher for that keyword. Nowadays, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text says more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So make sure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: it’s fine to use keywords but don’t add the exact same keywords to every link’s anchor text.
Yoast SEO includes several checks and features to help you improve your internal linking.
On a post level, the Yoast SEO plugin helps make sure you give internal links some thought. In the plugin meta box — or in the sidebar, as shown below –, the internal link assessment of Yoast SEO checks whether you’ve created links to other pages on your website in your text. It also checks if these links are followed or nofollowed.
For Yoast SEO for Shopify, this check only works on posts or pages. The reason for not having internal links on your product pages or in your product descriptions is that you want to keep customers there — not send them to another part of your site. You need your customer to convert as quickly as possible. An important part of Shopify SEO, right?
Checking if you’ve added enough internal links in Yoast SEO
Checking if you’ve added enough internal links in Yoast SEO for Shopify only works in posts and pages, not products
To get a green bullet for this check, add contextual internal links to relevant content on your site.
Text link counter
If you have Yoast SEO for WordPress installed, you’ll also get a handy tool in your post overview, called the text link counter. This tool counts the internal links in a post and the internal links pointing to a post. This visualizes which posts should receive more links. This will all help you work purposely on your site structure.
You can see the number of internal links pointing to and from a post with Yoast SEO
Easy internal linking with Yoast SEO Premium
The internal linking suggestion
By now you are probably aware of the importance of internal linking for SEO. But handpicking articles – and relevant articles – to link to isn’t always easy. Even if you have a small website, you might not remember every piece of content you’ve published. And if you’re managing a medium to large website, especially one where various people can write and publish content, it’s really difficult to know all the content you have on a given topic. When this happens, internal linking can take much more of your time than it should.
That’s exactly why in Yoast SEO Premium, we’ve built a dedicated feature for internal linking – the internal linking suggestion. It’s incredibly easy to use and you only need to set up for this feature once. Yoast SEO will first scan, analyze and try to make sense of all your content in WordPress. Then when you write a post, you can immediately link to a related post by copying or dragging the link directly into the editor. You’ll see the suggestions in the Yoast SEO sidebar on the right-hand side of your screen. For instance, the screenshot below shows the internal linking suggestions for this post you’re reading! The green tick indicates that we’re linking to the suggested post from this one.
This feature makes internal linking much more intuitive. And that’s thanks to Yoast SEO content analysis running in real-time in the background. It analyses and compares your text to existing content on your site to pick out articles that best fit your new post, all while you’re writing! Even if the articles are written a while ago or by someone else in your team, Yoast SEO won’t miss them. This way, it will help you set up a great structure by connecting related content to each other without overlooking articles you might not think of right away.
Internal linking suggestions by Yoast SEO Premium for this article
The cornerstone approach internal linking workout
Getting your internal links back in shape is important because that helps you rank with the content you want to rank. That’s why we’ve introduced the cornerstone content internal linking workout in Yoast SEO Premium. You can use this workout to improve your internal linking based on the cornerstone approach we discussed earlier. In six easy steps, you can improve your site structure by learning where to find your cornerstones, how many links they have at the moment, and how to add links pointing to these important posts.
The first step in the cornerstone content workout in Yoast SEO Premium
The orphaned content internal linking workout
Orphaned content are your pages and posts that don’t have any internal links pointing to them. That makes them hard for users to find, and also hard for search engines to crawl. In the orphaned content workout, we identify your orphaned content for you and give you all the options and tools you need to deal with it! Maybe you don’t want those pages to be found. Maybe you want to delete them. Or maybe you want these pages to rank in Google and be found by your visitors. Whatever you decide for each page, the steps in this SEO workout make it easy for your to clean up your content.
The first step in the orphaned content workout in Yoast SEO Premium
When you have our Premium plugin, you can find these internal linking workouts in the backend of your WordPress website. Just go to SEO in your left side menu, and select the menu item ‘Workouts’. This will take you to a page where you can find our workouts. Of course, we’ll add other SEO workouts as we go along, which you’ll also find here when they’re released!
Go Premium and unlock this feature!
Unlock our internal linking features and get free access to all of our SEO courses with Yoast SEO Premium:
Child and sibling block
In the WordPress block editor, you can also easily link child and sibling pages with Yoast SEO premium. If you want to make sure you link all child and sibling pages, just select the sibling or subpages block, add it to your post, and you’re done. Of course, this only works for hierarchical post types.
Without links, your content can’t rank! With a solid internal linking strategy, you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. If you follow the guidelines in this post both Google and your users will understand your site better, which will, in turn, increase your chance of ranking.
Meike Hendriks is a UX Researcher and digital marketer at Yoast. She works on User Research, Usability Testing, User Testing and Product marketing to continuously improve Yoast.com and all Yoast products.
