Why Site Structure is Important
TweetA lot of people think SEO boils down to creating the right content, optimizing that content for the keywords you want to rank for, and then driving links with keyword rich anchor text to that page. If you do those three things and do it well then you are going to have a lot of success getting high rankings. However, there is another aspect that you can't ignore: the structure of your site.
Even without as many inbound links as a competitor, the internal linking structure of a site can push it higher in the rankings. A solid site structure magnifies your link building efforts, giving you more "bang for your buck." There are two audiences you are trying to serve with your site structure:
Human Visitors
Always focus on your human users. Your most important goal should be to make the site easy to use for your "real" visitors. The user should be able to get to where they want to go in just a few clicks with each click getting them closer to their goal and final destination.
Every goal you have with your site has to do with the end user, whether it's to get them to buy something from you, support your cause, or whatever else. A positive experience will leave your visitors happy and happy visitors sign up for your newsletter, purchase products, and link to your site.
Search Engine Spiders
You optimize your site structure for search engine spiders in three ways: funneling link juice to your most important pages, firing keyword-rich anchor text to pages on your site, and linking to your deep content to make sure those pages get indexed.
Link juice is important because each page has to have a certain amount of pagerank in order to be shown in the results. The more pages that link to the page, the more pagerank gets sent to that page.
Anchor text tells the spiders what the page the link is pointing to is about. Keyword-rich anchor text is the holy grail of SEO marketers, but too many ignore the opportunities presented on their own sites. If you are looking to get a boost for a certain keyword, change the anchor texts of your internal links to that page and more than likely it will help.
Getting every page on your site indexed is important. This gives you more pages to work with for firing anchor text and it gives you more landing pages in the search engine results. The more landing pages you have in the index the more long tail keyword terms you are going to rank for without even trying. Don't discount this traffic because over time it will make up the majority of your new visitors.