A clear and consistent website structure is important when building your web pages. The structure of your website has a great influence on the number of visitors you will get. Learn how to plan the structure of a website in order to optimize its traffic potential.
Here are the most important factors to consider when building an ecommerce website as regards the website structure:
•Clean and clear layout
•Clear and easy navigation (internal linking)
•One page for each topic
•Relatively short pages
•Depth of the website (number of levels/tiers)
•Anchor text
Layout
First of all, you do not have to have a fancy looking website with lots of graphics, flashing and twinkling "things" all over the pages. On the contrary, most visitors hate it! So, keep it clean, clear and simple to make a visit to your pages a pleasant experience.
Stick to a simple color plan with only a few matching colors - don't use many different colors. Lines and boxes are fine to break up a page, and so are headings for each section of information.
Navigation
When creating your website navigation structure it's most important to make a logical structure. Make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for!
Your home page should have a navigation bar preferably on the left side, linking to the main pages of your site. The home page should also have text links to those same pages (with a short introduction), placed on the bottom of the page. This also applies to the "level 2" pages (see below).
One topic per page
Each theme or topic (f.ex. product or service category) should have its own page, don't write about more than one subject on a page. With more pages you will also have more keywords, page titles and filenames, which are good "bait" for search engines. Don't make the pages of your site too long; it's best to have relatively short pages, as shorter pages are preferred by visitors and search engines alike.
Of course you must provide sufficient information on the topic of a page to satisfy the readers. However, for good website structure it's better to divide a big topic in sub-topics and make multiple pages than creating one looong page.
How many levels?
When planning the structure of your website, you have to consider how "deep" it should be, meaning how many levels (tiers) it should have. The home page is level 1. Then there will be some level 2 pages, one for each main topic of your business theme. Each main topic (f.ex. product category) will naturally have a number of more specific topics (products etc.), which will make up the level 3 pages (usually many more of them than level 2 pages).
Do your visitors and the search engines a favor - don't go deeper than three levels. If you do, the visitors may "get lost" on your website and return to Google and try the next site. And search engines can also be "confused" by a complicated website structure and might not search deeper than three levels in any case, so keep it there.
Internal linking
As mentioned above, your home page should have a navigation bar (on the left side) and text links on the bottom of the page, all directing to the main category (level 2) pages. The level 2 pages must of course link to their sub-pages (level 3), preferably using text links, and they must link to the home page. The level 2 pages should also link to each other, which they automatically will if the navigation bar is done correctly.
In an easy and effective website structure the level 3 pages must be linked back to their "mother page". They should also link to the home page via text links on the bottom. Depending on the situation, level 3s can also link to each other - when it's relevant and to the purpose - through contextual links.
Test your links to make sure they work. Broken links are frowned upon by search engines when their spiders can't follow them, and your visitors are irritated by broken links as well.
Anchor Text
is the text a link is attached to (the word(s) being blue, underlined and clickable). Give some consideration to the anchor text. Instead of just "click here", use descriptive text as anchor text to make it easy for users to navigate, and for search engines to understand what the page you are linking to is about.
In-depth explanation on anchor text here: Linking With Anchor Text.
Links on your page may point to other pages on your own website, or to other sites. Link to other sites that add value to your visitors and that are not in direct competition with your own website.
Create the links to these other sites so that they open in a new browser window. The search engines appreciate a couple of links to quality websites on your pages (must not be confused with "backlinks" - see Building Backlinks Basics).