It’s all about the user experience in 2021, and your blog should follow the tendency too. Whether you start to blog or you’re already a blog star, you don’t want your blog to be a mess and complicated for browsing. The simpler the navigation is, the better the user experience you can count on. For that reason, our experienced SEO professionals decided to show you how to organize your WordPress blog and attain a friendly user experience that will keep the visitors longer on your website and improve your rankings in search engines.
Table of Contents
- Blog Structure
- Homepage
- Categories and Tags
- Archive Page
- Related Posts
- Internal linking
- Do you need breadcrumbs?
Blog Structure: Menu, Navigation
The blog structure is important not only for your users but for Google, too. Google’s algorithms rely on the site structure when deciding which piece of content to show first in the search query. For that reason, the menu, navigation, and site structure are of utmost importance, and they just have to be impeccably structured.
The menu is a good starting point for structuring your WordPress blog. The menu should be as simple and logically organized so that your visitors could easily find what they’re searching for. Also, make sure to place a sticky header so that your visitors can always get back to the menu if they get lost.
Another way you can make navigation to be easier is by placing major categories in the menu. This is also a good way to indirectly show your visitors what to focus on while searching on your website.
Homepage
In most cases, the homepage will be the very first page your visitors will land on, and this is why you should keep it perfectly optimized and easy to navigate. The homepage usually acts as a navigation hub, and that’s why you should link all the important pages of your website there.
The homepage has the purpose of welcoming page, which will direct the navigation over the whole website. For that reason, it has to be clear and simple because you don’t want your visitors to get confused.
Your homepage should highlight the most important pages and categories on your website, such as the contact page, about me, or even a link to your online store.
Categories and Tags
WordPress labels all categories and tags by default. This means you will have to organize your categories and tags and decide what posts will be associated with each label.
Both categories and tags have a direct impact on your blog’s user experience and rankings in search engines. It would be great to align them with keywords and optimize them simultaneously for search engines.
What is the difference between categories and tags?
Categories have hierarchical criteria, while tags have the function of a more detailed description. This way, they help the visitors to navigate easier throughout the content and decide whether to click or not on the page or article.
Let’s suppose you are running a blog based on book recommendations. Logically, your book blog will not strictly cover one subject, genre, or writer. Meaning, you can organize the categories based on genres, such as non-fiction, fantasy, drama, history, or belletristic. This way, you will clearly indicate to the visitor what the category is about and make the search process easier. Also, the functionalities of categories enable the implementation of the subcategories and sub-subcategories, which are an integral part of your blog’s structure, and signify to Google, too, what the website content is about.
As we have already noted, the tags are more descriptive. In our example of a blog based on book recommendations, the tags could be used to refer to a specific author or book, and this will also be more than a helpful option for your users while navigating the website.
Optimizing the Categories and Tags
Since categories and tags are an integral part of the website’s structure, make sure not to change them often. Any change of the category or tag name or their URLs may lead to losing your backlinks or get 404 pages. And all of this can consequently lead to losing your rankings. So, before you create any of them, make sure the name and URL match the keyword you want to rank for.
Archive Page
Every time you create a category or a tag, you create an archive page on your WordPress blog. There will be listed all the posts or pages within a category or a tag on this archive page, so you should keep it properly optimized to enhance the user experience on navigating your WordPress blog through it.
There are also author archives and date archive pages, so you can determine what of those three types the most suitable for your website’s users.
Related Posts
Related posts can be another useful way to organize your WordPress blog and make content navigation easier for your user. Related posts often encourage the user to further reading and spending more time on your blog.
If the option for related posts is not enabled within your WordPress theme, you can easily add it by installing some of the plugins that provide this possibility, like Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) or Jetpack.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is another way to keep your readers longer on your blog. Internal linking can be described as building a net over your content that directs your readers further to your blog’s relevant topics. The secret of internal linking is in making natural connections between topics in your writing. These links will give a signal to Google what topics your blog covers and give you an opportunity for higher ranking among many similar blogs.
Do You Need Breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs are regulating the so-called secondary navigation of your blog. They help users to understand the relation between their location on a page (like a product page) and higher-level pages, such as a category page. Breadcrumbs help search engines to determine the structure of your website easier, too.
However, not every website needs one. For example, if you run a blog that contains several pages and category pages, it is most likely you won’t need breadcrumbs. On the other hand, if you run a blog within an eCommerce website, then breadcrumbs are necessary since they will help users to navigate through the website effortlessly.
Adding breadcrumbs to your WordPress blog is pretty simple, and you can do it using some of the various plugins, such as Breadcrumb NavXT or Flexy Breadcrumb.
Final Thoughts
Now when you have a basic idea of creating a well-organized WordPress blog, you can start working on it and improving your website organization. This way, you will impact the website’s usability and findability opportunities and make a firm structure that will affect the rank positions in search engines, too. Don’t forget that the way you organize the content is crucial for search engines to recognize what your website is about, and this is one of the most important starting points for SEO strategy.
