The short answer is: “to help you visitors and search engine crawlers better understand the content of your website”. This may sound like common sense, however I do find myself often surprised how many websites forget this small yet so important part of website optimization.
Last week I was a speaker on the Google Site Clinic at the A4U Expo conference in London and during this session I highlighted a few times that the websites submitted for review were not using basic structuring elements to its full advantage. Based on the conversations I had at this conference, I wanted to elaborate on why I believe structuring your website well matters.
Imagine the following: You are in university and asked by your professor to write a 60-pages paper/report on a certain subject (note: it doesn’t really matter what the subject is). You will proceed with writing down all the chapters, paragraphs and resources. Now do you structure this? Of course you do! You will use a cover, a table of content, an index, etc. You do this to make the paper/report more readable for the reader, which is in this case your professor and your rewards may be a higher grade.
So coming back to websites, why you should do the same for your website? Keeping in mind that the reader will be, among others, visitors and search engine crawlers and that your rewards may be increased sales, trust as a authority and possibly even improved rankings in search engines.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean by comparing the structure of a paper with the desired structure of a website.
- The cover, title page and summary page can be compared to your home page. It draws the attention of the visitors and persuade them to continue deeper into your website. I would recommend you to read “Chapter 7: The first step in recovery is admitting that the Home page is beyond your control” in the book “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug. This chapter highlights best practices on how to improve your home page in usability and get the attention of the visitor.
- The table of contents can be compared to your navigation options and/or your on-site sitemap (both the HTML version for humans and the XML version for search engines). This will tell the visitor where they can find what and what topics to expect on the website.
- The author page can be compared to the ‘about’ and/or ‘contact’ page of your website. It will allow the visitor to get to know you, and understand why you are an authority on the subject. It can also offer a way for the visitor to establish direct contact with you.
- The header and the footer blocks in your paper can be compared to header, footer and breadcrumbs in your website. It will give the visitor/reader a direct understanding where they are, within the website related to other pages in the website and what the title of the website is.
- The individual chapters can be compared to individual pages/sections of the website. In these chapters you often find a chapter title (e.g. in websites you can use an H1-tag for this), section or sub titles (e.g. H2-tags), paragraph titles (e.g. H3-tags) and paragraphs (e.g. P-tags) with the actual content. The W3C HTML standard is specifically designed based on this logic.
- The footnotes, references and resources/literature appendixes can be compared to the internal and external links within your website. It allows the visitor to find more detailed information on the subject.
- The index at the back of your paper can be compared to the search functionality on your website. It allows the user to use a keyword to quickly find specific pages relevant to that keyword.
- … Just to name a few examples.
So when you are design a website, you should really keep the structuring of your website in mind. Not just because this will help search engines better understand the structure of your website (and you may rank better because of this), but improved structuring can lead to increased visitor satisfaction and sales/conversions. I recommend you to read the “SEO Starters Guide” by Google and “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug and take some time to apply these best practices to your website.
I love to hear what other resources would you recommend. Please do share your comments below.
Update [Dec 2nd, 2009]
If you can read Dutch, you may also be interested in the following article: Kopjes gebruiken voor zoekmachine optimalisatie.
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