Improving WordPress Site Structure

An often-overlooked part of on-page SEO is the wordpress site structure. A simple and easy to navigate structure with obvious navigational links on blogs is fundamental to keep users on the site enabling them to easily browse around the site. When developing a wordpress site, this should actually be one of the first things you make sure that you get right. Make sure to use important keywords when building the category structure so that you can easily archive posts in relevant categories. Having a good site structure ensures that the flow of link juice obtained from backlinks goes to your most important money pages on your site.

That’s why undertaking SEO keyword research is so important in the early phase of a project. Once you have a list of 10-20 core keywords you want to rank for, you can structure your site around those keywords. Make sure to target the top 1-3 keywords on the homepage, since it is considered the most important page of your site as it generally always attracts the most number of backlinks. You also want to think of a good way to categorize the information on your blog.

When targeting other important keywords, which are less competitive then the home page keywords, the inner pages should be as close to the homepage as possible. For example, your secondary keywords could be linked directly from the homepage so that the link juice will flow to those pages. Generally the further the page is from the home page the less authority it has. This is only not true when the page has many backlinks to the specific page.

As your site grows, the key is to continually monitor which pages produce the most money and best interaction with blog visitors so that you can link to the most popular pages in the top navigation to ensure link juice flows to the most important pages of your site.

This can easily be done with the Popular Posts wordpress plugin, which displays the most popular posts in the sidebar of your blog.

Great navigation and site structure that supports the searcher also helps visitors stay on your site for longer. The more time visitors spend on your site, the more likely they are to become loyal readers that will go on to buy whatever you’re selling. Installing the Similar Posts or Related Posts plugin in WordPress allows you to display a highly configurable list of related posts at the end of your posts. If the searcher likes the post they just read, the chances are they will like other articles on the same subject.

So with all of these great wordpress plugins it allows you to quickly optimize the site structure of any wordpress blogs, so there is no reason not to do it.