Website structure

How should I optimize my site structure?

Usually there are one or two key "landing pages" in a website. A landing page is the page that you want visitors to arrive on if they have found your site in search results. One key landing page is the site homepage, but another might be a product catalogue page, for example. To give these landing pages the best chance of ranking well in search results, you can structure the rest of the site around these pages.

The most common way of doing this is to use a "hub and spoke" structure for the site. This structures the site like a wheel, where the hub is the most important page and the spokes are links to other pages. For example, if optimising your homepage, the homepage is the hub. The homepage would then link to all the next level down subpages and those subpages would link back to the homepage. From the point of view of the search engine, this tells it that the homepage is the most important page and the other pages are all subpages. If on the other hand you had a "mesh" structure where every page links to every other page, this would tell the search engine that every page was equal in importance. In fact, site owners would usually want their homepage to rank better in search results than for example their terms and conditions page.

If you look closely, you will see that this site is structured using a simple "hub and spoke" design. The homepage links to all the subpages, via the buttons on the left-hand side of the screen. Each subpage links back to the homepage, via a link incorporated into the site logo. This tells Google that the homepage is the most important page and every other page has equal importance but not as much as the homepage. If alternatively the grey buttons appeared on every page, then that would make the site an example of the "mesh" structure and would tell Google that every page has equal importance throughout the site.

You can use a multi-level hub and spoke structure for a site. In this structure, a site can have a homepage (level 1), "chapter" pages (level 2) and subpages to each chapter (level 3). The level 3 pages link back to their relevant level 2 page and to the homepage. The level 2 pages link back to the homepage. An example of this might be an online shopping site, where the site sold socks, shoes and hats. The homepage would link to a Socks page, a Shoes page and a Hats page. On the Socks page, there would be links to subpages for men's socks, ladies' socks and children's socks. This would create the level 1, level 2, level 3 structure.