Architecture

The organization and structure of a website helps visitors navigate their way through the content, and it enables search engines to develop a contextual map of the content. Typically, the home page is a very general presentation of the organization at a high level. The main navigation contains links to the primary categories of content. Then, each category breaks down the content even further, becoming more detailed and descriptive.

The organization of your content pages should work together to present highly relevant categories of information. This enables the detailed pages to focus on the long‐tail, detailed keywords. As the visitor moves toward the main categories, the keywords become a bit more generalized.

This also helps to develop a URL format that can be consistently applied throughout the website. In WordPress, these are called permalinks, where the format is developed from the domain, or the root level, of the website.

• Domain/root: www.domain.com/
• Category: www.domain.com/category
• Subcategory, if needed: www.domain.com/category/topic
• Posts or pages: www.domain.com/category/topic/Optimizing-your-website/

Screaming Frog is one of the essential SEO tools for evaluating a website structure. It crawls (or “spiders”) a website, just like a search engine, and provides feedback on the success or failure in accessing pages and content of the website. It also produces a visualization of the site’s structure. Defining each category, subcategory, and the structure of the site assists the optimization and the website development. This helps by defining the filename of the pages and the content addressed on each.

In the example from worldwildlife.org shown back in Figure 4.10, Screaming Frog provides a visualization of the website’s structure. You can see the primary categories that make up the second and third levels of content, with the subsequent articles, stories, and information farther down. The information is logically organized and supports the focus of the organization.

Duplicate Content

A typical problem that arises with websites is duplicate content. This happens as the content populates a web page from a database and the pages are repeated across the website. Content duplication takes many forms. It can be a complete page, duplicated many times with unique URLs, to duplicated products that are listed numerous times throughout a website because tagging and category options create additional versions of the same product page, entire categories, or the entire website.

Duplicate content creates a problem that inhibits your rankings. It is not a penalty, but a structural issue. The search engine is attempting to identify the most relevant page on your website. However, if there are duplicated pages, which page should the search engine choose to rank? Having duplicate pages reduces relevance because there is not a single page of information, but 2, 5, or 100 with the same content. Which page is the real page?

When the search engine sees the same page available at different URLs, it doesn’t know which is the primary version of the page, called the primary URL. It may assign a version that you don’t prefer, which can limit your rankings and negatively impact your incoming link benefits.