About structure of content on a websites

How to build up, maintain and expand website structure.

[TimaChuduk]

The question is straightforward, how to plan and organize structure for a website.

If you never heard of SEO, like designers or programmers you may say that it must be logical, understandable for users.
And sure it is true. But when you trying to accuire organic traffic from search engines like google, or bing, or yandex
you have to choose another approach.

By other approach I mean SEO way. So what the idea of this approach? The idea is simple, first of all you need to know
what users are looking for and build structure using this knowledge. With tools like Google keyword planner or semrush
for clustering list of search queries by intent of user.

For example you may find out that in your niche many queries are terms and their definitions, like 'what is git' or 'definition of VPS'.
You decide to create a category td(terms&definitions) for example.

I know I missed a lot of stuff out there, like building Semantic core, explaining what is hard, soft and marked clustering and etc.
But I would love to know are there others approaches in building website structure, or SEO way is the only way ?

[edited by: not2easy at 2:21 pm (utc) on Mar 10, 2024]
[edit reason] Please see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[not2easy]

Hello TimaChuduk and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

There are a fair number of sites still doing well that started years before Google keyword planner or semrush existed. They are not magic tools you must use.

Rather than "knowing what users are looking for", it is better to know what you want to write about so people who are interested can find your content. When you follow the same road as millions of others, you may find that you are working against yourself because you are depending on SEO 'common knowledge' that is not spelled out anywhere that matters. SEO is not a static set of rules, it has to evolve every time Google makes changes, updates or adds new rules or metrics. If all houses are built the same way, they will all have the same vulnerabilities or weaknesses and be boring.

Why not lay out your content in a way that separates categories clearly and let your visitors show you how much they appreciate your efforts by actually finding what they are looking for by following your roadsigns. Site navigation is the make or break of a site because what value does wonderful, unique content have if people need to struggle and guess to find it? The "TD" category is not self explanatory.

If you want to have a site with unique and useful content, you will need to follow your own plan and not a list that everyone else is following. Write what you know about. Share your learned information. K.I.S.S is the best old advice I've heard: "Keep it simple, silly".

[tangor]

Setting up navigation by SEO keyword clusters will routinely fail as g keeps changing the keyword clusters.

There's a good reason why several thousand years of trial and error have produced a number of outstanding organization systems in use by humans. Pick one designed for your niche/content and go with confidence.

[explorador]

The idea is simple, first of all you need to know what users are looking for and build structure using this knowledge.

This described here is the usual "method" described by new content creators, but they are also inexperienced and often looking for "new" ways to do things, trying to reinvent the wheel. Yes, what you propose here makes sense, but while the advanced user (us) can have a more strategical approach, the average user can't even put into words what they want, need, or are searching for.

A good example is having such structure of related interesting and useful content, that the user lands on your site for one reason, but stays for another.