“Every battle is won or lost before it’s ever fought.”
At least that’s what Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese general, once said. Since Tzu lived around 545 B.C., we can safely assume he wasn’t talking about the essential keys to building a good online presence. But the importance the general placed on preparation before the battle is no less essential in getting ready to enter the digital space.
The number of areas involved in how to plan a website structure is extensive and ranges from the back end—what’s only visible to your tech team—to the content that you’ll display for your online audience. It’s that content that will be the focus here.
The first thing you need to decide is what you want to talk about. In the early stages of planning a structure, don’t be shy about wanting to have content on almost every medical topic your local area would be interested in. The phrase “Content Is King” has become a cliché in digital marketing, but like most cliches, it’s essentially true. If you don’t have content, you don’t have a purpose for a website. So get a lot of ideas rolling.
It’s in the organization that you’ll take a more discerning eye to the content. Now you have to decide how it should all be grouped together. Think of each article as belonging to a pyramid. The most important pieces, the ones that define each section, would be at the very top. Then you gradually move down the pyramid with more articles that might be less important, but greater in volume.
Then you need to establish the URL structure. Each pyramid can be a category and you want each article to have a clean, concise domain name. This means more than just giving it a unique name and not using the default URL your Content Management System assigns it on creation. This means creating a URL so concise that it tells the reader what the entire page is about.
Now it’s time for internal linking. This can be time-consuming when it comes to implementation, and you might wonder how many people will actually click on the links within each page. But they aren’t your primary audience. Google’s spiders are.
By taking the content within a specific pyramid and linking them together as much as possible, you are sending a clear message to Google what this section of your website is about. It’s a section whose design is invisible to the human eye, but it creates a very clear footprint for you in the organic search results.
Now it’s time to come back to the home page. Your menu will reflect your different pyramids and should easily communicate to the reader what each section is about. Now you have a website structure, one that’s easy for people to navigate for Google bots to comprehend.