Improving Site Structure and Navigation

Some common problems that result from a site architecture such as the one above include:

• It often results in orphan pages (with no internal links pointing to them). Orphaned pages may go unindexed, preventing them from appearing in search results.

• Indexing issues are difficult to locate and fix.

• It makes it difficult for users to navigate through our website. Imagine trying to find a page that’s hidden somewhere in the lowest level of hierarchy! It’s nearly impossible to locate it in endless subcategories unless we have a direct URL to the page.

• It results in complex and lengthy URLs.

In contrast, SEOs often advocate for a ‘flat’ website architecture such as the one below:

Breadcrumb navigation

Other than a flat and intuitive website architecture, breadcrumb navigation is another feature that makes our site easy to navigate. If we remember the childhood fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”, we’ll also recall the role breadcrumbs played in it.

Adapted from the same concept, breadcrumb navigation builds a trail of the visitor's journey on our website. The navigation menu provides links to jump back to any of the categories in the higher hierarchical levels to the page that the user is currently on. For example, in the image above, the breadcrumb navigation is highlighted in blue near the top of the page. With a single click, the user can jump back to the category Dog, or Articles or Purina’s homepage.

Breadcrumbs also help search engines understand our site structure and crawl our pages.

Furthermore, we can add structured data to our breadcrumbs to qualify for the page’s appearance as breadcrumbs in Google Search as shown in the image above. Google provides guidelines on how to add breadcrumb markup to our pages [31].

Yoast SEO allows us to automatically add breadcrumbs navigation to our WordPress site, once the feature is switched on. It also adds structured data to our breadcrumbs to make it easier for Google to understand our site structure. By adding the relevant JSON-LD data in the source code, it helps Google implement breadcrumbs to our site for rich snippets. Here’s more information on how to implement breadcrumbs with Yoast SEO.

XML sitemaps

XML sitemap is a huge plus for a technically optimized website.

There are two ways for finding a page for a search engine:

• By following a link on another page

• By reading if from the URLs listed in an XML sitemap of a website

In the ideal case, all our pages are properly linked through navigation bars or contextual internal links. In such cases, Google can discover most of your site even without a sitemap [32]. However, cases where websites aren’t structured ideally result in the creation of orphan pages that go unindexed. Here’s where an XML sitemap can ensure all our pages, including orphan pages, are crawled and indexed. Whether we’re confident about our site’s structure or not, creating and uploading an XML sitemap of our website to Google Search Console won’t bring any harm. If anything, it will improve crawling and indexing of our pages.

Creating and uploading XML sitemaps

Many CMS systems, including WordPress and Magento, will automatically generate a sitemap file for our website. If we don’t have this feature for our site, we can use the free XML Sitemaps Generator tool to automatically create our website’s sitemap.

Here’s what an XML sitemap, generated by the above tool, looks like:

Download the XML file created by the tool and upload it to the main directory of the website. Once uploaded on the website, the sitemap will be publicly accessible to search engines and users and will have a URL similar to the one below:

https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemaps.xml

Here’s what an XML sitemap page on our website will look like:

Once live on our website, we should also submit it to Google using the Sitemaps report on Google Search Console. Enter the URL in the Sitemaps report and click "Submit." Google provides complete guidelines to managing our sitemaps using the Sitemaps report [33].

Test your knowledge

Choose the best option for each of the following questions.