In the last lesson, “Good Site Architecture at the Farmers Market”, we discussed the value of thematically grouping content into appropriate categories. However, as many webmasters begin to pursue this they find themselves in a conundrum or two.
Typically the core products or services a company offers will become top level pages. Often times these top level pages may get a supporting page or two that goes a little deeper into the features or other details related to that product or service. Then, it is extremely common for the site to feature a blog, resource section, videos or support forum and consistently fill those sections with great in-depth content about the products or services.
Unfortunately, this creates a structure where the most important pages seem to be minimally supported and the majority of the new content that is continuously being added to the site is added in other seemingly unrelated sections of the site. This creates a situation where the majority of in-depth content isn’t supporting the most important pages as well as it could.
Think of your site as a tree. The homepage is the trunk of the tree, each category is a different branch, content pages are the leaves and your site visitors are the life giving sun.
Your goal is to build an Oak Tree, not a Broke Tree:
OK… so I’m no arborist and I know that this doesn’t look much like an oak tree… but let’s get past that.
An Oak Tree has a trunk that gives way to sprawling branches, each reaching outward and upward to expose its many leaves to the light of day. For a website this means a homepage (tree trunk) that focuses on moving visitors to the proper category and sub-category pages (branches), and ultimately to the pages (leaves) that live at the end of a site structure with lots of relevant and related information. Everything along each branch shares a common theme. This is what we want to accomplish.
This Broke Tree has many of its leaves growing right out from the trunk, and may have one big branch growing out from its side with the vast majority of the trees leaves. The sad truth is that there are a lot of websites that actually fit this site architecture model. Typically these website will have have a flat architecture for the most important pages and not many true supporting pages. Another common theme with these “broke tree” site is one big branch leads to a blog or resource section that holds all of the deep content that is relevant to all of the products/services. This is a complete breakdown in categorization.
How Should Your Content Be Structured?
Your site should be developed in a way that will clearly differentiate your products and services and then clearly and continuously support them as you develop new content.
It is typically easy to identify the appropriate top level categories around types of products or services, however keeping related content within the same hierarchy gets difficult when you have product sections, and a blog, and a resources section, and videos, etc… Let’s consider the following sitemap examples:
Example 1: This is the sitemap for a Broke Tree (with URL structures)
- Homepage: http://www.website.com/
- Product 1: http://www.website.com/product-1/
- Product 2: http://www.website.com/product-2/
- Blog: http://www.website.com/blog/
- Category 1 Blog Roll: http://www.website.com/blog/category-1/
- Category 1 Blog Post: http://www.website.com/blog/category-1/name/
- Category 2 Blog Roll: http://www.website.com/blog/category-2/
- Category 2 Blog Post: http://www.website.com/blog/category-2/name/
- Category 1 Blog Roll: http://www.website.com/blog/category-1/
- Resources: http://www.website.com/resources/
- Category 1 Resources: http://www.website.com/resources/category-1/
- Category 1 Resource: http://www.website.com/resources/category-1/name/
- Category 2 Resources: http://www.website.com/resources/category-2/
- Category 2 Resource: http://www.website.com/resources/category-2/name/
- Category 1 Resources: http://www.website.com/resources/category-1/
- Videos: http://www.website.com/videos/
- Category 1 Vidoes: http://www.website.com/videos/category-1/
- Category 1 Video: http://www.website.com/videos/category-1/name/
- Category 2 Videos: http://www.website.com/videos/category-2/
- Videos Category 2: http://www.website.com/videos/category-2/name/
- Category 1 Vidoes: http://www.website.com/videos/category-1/
- Support Forum: http://www.website.com/support/
- Category 1 Support: http://www.website.com/support/category-1/
- Category 1 Support Topic: http://www.website.com/support/category-1/topic/
- Category 2 Support: http://www.website.com/support/category-2/
- Category 2 Support Topic: http://www.website.com/support/category-2/topic/
- General Support: http://www.website.com/support/general/
- Category 1 Support: http://www.website.com/support/category-1/
- Shopping Cart: https://www.website.com/cart
- Checkout: https://www.website.com/cart/checkout/
In the above Broke Tree example, this website could have dozens or even hundreds of pages filled with highly valuable content about each product, however, the only way that Google is able to understand if that content is related to the products is through the words that are presented on each page. The keyword density of those related words could indicate how strongly those pages might be related to each product. Links that could be connecting the content pages to the product pages are another way that Google could tell if the pages are related. However, you must remember that due to your header and footer navigation, every page is also linking to nearly every other category of content on the site as well. Therefore, the above category structure really takes away from your site’s ability to demonstrate depth and breadth of content on a particular topic.
Example 2: This is the sitemap for an Oak Tree (with URL structures)
- Homepage: https://website.com/
- Product 1: https://www.website.com/product-1/
- Blog Roll Category 1: https://www.website.com/product-1/blog/
- Category 1 blog: https://www.website.com/product-1/blog/blog-title/
- Resources Category 1: https://www.website.com/product-1/resources/
- Category 1 Resource: https://www.website.com/product-1/resources/resource-name/
- Videos Category 1: https://www.website.com/product-1/videos/
- Category 1 Video https://www.website.com/product-1/videos/video-name/
- Support Category 1: https://www.website.com/product-1/support/
- Category 1 Support Topic: https://www.website.com/product-1/support/topic/
- Blog Roll Category 1: https://www.website.com/product-1/blog/
- Product 2: https://www.website.com/product-2/
- Blog Roll Category 2: https://www.website.com/product-2/blog/blog-title/
- Category 2 blog: https://www.website.com/product-2/blog/blog-title/
- Resources Category 2: https://www.website.com/product-2/resources/resource-name/
- Category 2 Resource: https://www.website.com/product-2/resources/resource-name/
- Videos Category 2: https://www.website.com/product-2/videos/video-name/
- Category 2 Video: https://www.website.com/product-2/videos/video-name/
- Support Category 2: https://www.website.com/product-2/support/
- Category 2 Support Topic: https://www.website.com/product-2/support/topic/
- Blog Roll Category 2: https://www.website.com/product-2/blog/blog-title/
- Blog: https://www.website.com/blog/
- Resources: https://www.website.com/resources/
- Videos: https://www.website.com/videos/
- Support Forum: https://www.website.com/support/
- General Support: https://www.website.com/support/general/
- Shopping Cart: https://www.website.com/cart
- Checkout: https://www.website.com/cart/checkout/
- Product 1: https://www.website.com/product-1/
In the above Oak Tree example the most important pages on the site (the product pages) are being clearly and continuously supported as new relevant content is added, whether in the form of blogs, resources, videos or support forum discussions.
Typically the biggest question that arises around this Oak Tree content structure has to do with the user experience. In the Oak Tree example, the homepage for the blog, resources section, videos section and support forum all reside separately and through the presentation of standard navigation these pages are still adequately made visible and accessible to site visitors. Remember, that typically each of these pages is actually just aggregating posts in a blog roll type format. A blog roll can be configured to aggregate content based on whatever parameters you set up. So the categories and individual posts can actually live anywhere on the site. Any modern CMS can handle this type of functionality with ease.
To be clear, each of the blog, resource, video and support categories that are specific to the products or services on your site should actually live (via the URL structure) beneath the top level product/service/topic page and therefore search engines will clearly see all of that content as supporting the core product/service/topic.
Clarification About How To Go Through This Planning Process
The oak tree vs. broke tree is a conceptual analogy and an exercise in understanding how to create URL paths that support categorization of content along the line of a topic, rather by content type.
The idea of a “broke tree” is where content is categorized by content type. Most companies have a strong tendency to do this.
- Service pages go in a service page section.
- Videos go with videos.
- Whitepapers go with whitepapers.
The “conventional wisdom” behind this type of categorization is that... if a user goes to a site looking for a whitepaper, they should be able to go to a section and look through all of the whitepapers.
But the truth is, users don’t go to a site looking for a whitepaper, or a video… they go looking for information about a specific topic. Perhaps that topic is a service, perhaps it is a video about how the service works, perhaps they want to see a case study about how that service performed for others… but the point is, people are interested in a topic and then they want to explore content associated with that topic.
When search engines see a bunch of different types of supplemental content that is grouped around a central topic, they understand that central topic page to be a great resource for that topic. This is a powerful way to increase the search engine rankings for all of the keyword phrases that are relevant to the pages in this section.
The strongest way to demonstrate to search engines that all of that content is tightly themed around the same topic is through the URL structure.
If there are several different types of content, all about the same topic, but the URL structures seem pretty unrelated… Google has a harder time understanding how much content your site is actually offering about that subject.
That is why it is better to group content around a topic, rather than by content type.
Of course, it still makes a lot of sense to have a category page for every different type of content… so a services section, a video section, a whitepaper section all make sense. But, to avoid duplicate content, each of those resources should live in the right place based on topic, and they can be assigned a tag that will allow you to build category pages that pull the images, headlines, summaries, etc… similar to how blog rolls and dynamic menus work.
So, in this phase we just want to make sure that we are creating a site map with URL structures that place content around topics… and as you can see, once we get this right, your developers will have to put some work into creating appropriate cross-pollination of content for those category pages and dynamic menus.
Just to be clear, creating a mind map site structure document where pages are visually represented similar to the tree illustrations can be a very good mind mapping exercise, but for moving forward in a practical way it is best to create a site map using a spreadsheet program such as Google Docs or Microsoft Excel. In Column A you would enter the URL for the page, and then in the columns to the right, you should create a nested outline.
For instance, the only page listed in Column B would be the homepage. Pages in column C would represent those that are directly under the homepage, such as http://example.com/column-c. Then in column D you would include pages that are nested within the column C pages such as, http://example.com/column-c/column-d… and so on. The end result should give you both an easy to view list of URLs in Column A, and a visual representation of how pages are actually organized within the site in columns B, C, D, E and so on.
One more important note about SSL
Notice that in the second URL structure example above, every page is utilizing https:// that is because Google has recommended that every site utilize SSL to ensure that the web offers the safest experience possible for users. It has also been indicated that the use of a sitewide SSL certificate is a positive ranking factor.
Now that you understand the ideal site structure
Let's Resolve Some Common Issues…
Next In the next lesson we will take a look at how to interlink different sections of your website where appropriate and create user paths that support a great user experience, while leading users down your conversion funnels. Let’s figure how to deal with