Many website owners neglect structure and organization when they work to improve their sites’ search engine results page ranking. There are many different aspects you have to consider when you optimize your website’s search engine performance, and organization is one that offers you some powerful potential results. Here are a few ways you can build good SEO performance into your site’s structure.

For starters, categorizing your pages rigorously is a very good idea. There should be a place for every type of content you want to include on your site. This categorization should be hierarchical, as well. That means that each page should be categorized at the same level as every other page that provides a similar level of detail. Define a series of steps leading from your home page down to the most detailed pages you include, and place each page on its proper step. This kind of hierarchy will make your site easier to maintain, and it also helps search engines index all of your content properly.

If you want your whole site to perform well with the search engines, you should consider every page as a potential landing page. Ask yourself how a visitor’s first impression of your site will change based on what page he or she sees first. You want to minimize the range of potential impressions available by making all of your pages welcoming to first-time visitors. Never assume that a visitor will arrive at a given page by descending the set of category steps you defined in the last paragraph; make each page as self-sufficient as possible.

In fact, considering each page individually is an excellent idea. Not only should the content visible to the visitor be self-contained, the page’s optimization features should be focused strictly on the subject of the page itself. Rather than trying to improve the ranking of your entire site, try to make each page perform as well as it can. Building a host of pages that get decent search engine exposure is easier than attempting to produce and maintain an all-inclusive rankings-dominating website. If both strategies result in more traffic coming to your site, why not go with the more efficient option?

After following this advice, you’ll have a collection of diverse pages, each one of them tightly-focused and optimized based on a single topic. You’ll have a categorization system that provides rational organization behind the scenes, but this does not give visitors much help. You need to include a navigation system that makes it easy for them to leave their landing page and explore the rest of your site. Because you want to develop one set of navigation tools to use on every page, it’s a good idea to invest significant thought into making them as clear and easy to use as possible.

Using the techniques outlined here can make a big difference in the way you organize and maintain your website. They do require a serious amount of effort to put into practice, but you will likely find the results easily justify your hard work. Turning your website into a well-organized collection of strong individual pages will seriously amplify the amount of traffic it receives.