Video Summary

So, in this lesson, I want to go over website structure and internal links.

Now, this is a pretty straightforward concept. But I do want to reinforce the idea of how you set up and structure the content on your website. Because not only does it make it easier for the user to navigate and get around in your website, but also allows the search engines to really understand what is going on with the content for both sides. Alright, so I got some I got some visual representations here. 

I just want to go over the ideas. Real quick is that you want to have your website layout make sense and go in order from very broad ideas into specific topics. And you want to have your you want to lay out your information so the user can keep diving deeper into your website. So when they want to learn more, they can just keep going down the rabbit hole, but also too is that if you haven’t structured where, if they’re say if they’re looking for your like a product of yours on your website, and they go when they find it right away, and they go in and purchase it great, but maybe they want to go and see alternatives. They want to see other options. Maybe they want to see other stuff, but you want to make it to where they can keep diving into your site as they need to and also to as you you’re gonna want to provide links well through your navigation menu, so that could be your your main menu at the top of your website. It could be your footer menus, it could be your sidebar menus and if you just want to provide the link so if someone is on a certain section of your website, you want to make it easy for them to keep going on and keep learning more. So let me show you what I mean by this. Alright, so I just created just something just as like if you think about this as a topic, okay? 

And topic is growing tomatoes. Alright, so like the three broad categories that you’d want to use would maybe be like the sunlight, the soil and the nutrients right. And then from there, if it’s sunlight, you know when to plant what type one Windley or what or what time of year should you plant the tomato? Do you you’re going to need to put them out in the direct sunlight and put them in to if they get too much sun, are they going to die? You know, those are just kind of keep you keep drilling down and if you keep going further and further with soil right, you might you don’t need to have a ton of these but maybe with soil, it’s just like, what’s the best soil to use for tomatoes, right? And now if you’re lifting about nutrients, right now you’re like, well, what’s the feeding schedule? What’s the watering schedule? Because you don’t need to feed your tomatoes every single day and what happens when it rains? Right? So these are just very simple concepts but that’s how you should think about structuring out your website and your internal link strategies is that if you’re talking about nutrients, you’re going to want to have potentially maybe some sidebar links that are talking about here’s some nutrients that I recommend for growing tomatoes, or here is a simple here’s like a cool link to a PDF download where you can figure out what watering schedule is right? Like that’s how you should think about setting up your websites. So I came up with to, to kind of sitemap says Page structures. Alright, so we’ll say right here is the homepage. And right here is the about page, the residential page, the commercial page, the blog page and the contact us page. Alright, so I just kind of put blog in green because that could be essentially tied to a bunch of different other things right. So say for instance, are you got residential and this is a general contractor. 

Alright, so they can do residential working on homes, and they can work on commercials so they’re working on businesses. So say this is their this is there’s kind of secondary menu right? So they’re talking about deck repair, kitchen remodels and roof replacement. So this is a talk about residential services. And this is the secondary layer of like, you know, maybe they’re like, Well, I want to look at kitchen remodels. But more specifically, I want to look at vanity sinks for kitchens. All right. So maybe that like that’s what they’re looking out for right now is they could to go down and keep drilling down until they find what they want. Or maybe they’re in a commercial business and they have not only maybe a storefront but a commercial kitchen as well. So they could go to storefront look at product displays. They could go to commercial kitchens, they will look at so hot, and then you can keep drilling down. Right. And another thing I do want to say too is is that you can always link from if you get down to a certain point and you want to get really specific of like, here’s a review of the Top Stove Top installs that are easiest sold top installs or the five best stoves. That’s gonna work for your kitchen, you know, for commercial kitchen, right? You could on these pages, you can link into the blog, right so like, just think about how that how that would work and how you know most websites are structured. It’s not a very overly complicated idea. But you want to make sure that as you’re setting up your site, and once it’s completed, that the the pay structure makes sense and all your links makes sense because that is how Google and a lot of these search engines are going to look at and interpret your site. So if you’re not making sense to not only your users, like how in the heck is Google and everyone else going to figure that out as well. One other thing I wanted to show you too, is that we got the sitemap right here and this was like a doggy daycare. And what I did is to as I had these I kind of like labeled these a little bit differently because this could actually work for like from from the kind of the link structure as well. So I recently just did a client’s website who had we did a doggy daycare. Now she wanted her website redone, but how she manages her reservations and how people could just set up and how people could set up and register for you know, either doggy daycare, or you know, dog boarding or potentially grooming or even training. She had another application that she uses to manage your whole business. So so what we did was is we set up and these were off site links, but that’s it’s not a it’s not a big deal. If you have it set up in the right way. Alright, so this was just kind of like a one I want to throw in here that just be you don’t have to have everything on your site. Because sometimes you’ll have an application that’s not on your main site but you use you use it for you know your booking, you know, maybe you have like a site that if you’re a restaurant, maybe like Uber Eats or DoorDash set you up with like your own ordering site right so you’d still you’d have like your actual WordPress website but then you could when someone clicks on like an order now they go into the ordering portal. Right. So this is very common and your you will not get penalized for setting this up. But your page structure might look something like this. And also to is that you know, just because you’re talking about your services here. 

We didn’t have a services page. This was a dead link. So if someone hovers over here, it would drop down you see these four items, right? But what this was just basically the whole page, but if you want to if you want to talk about doggy daycare, maybe there was different different packages for different dogs. And that’s where you kind of just keep rolling out your site structure. So it’s I think you guys get it, but I just want to really kind of hone in on why the page structure and the Sitemaps are so important. Luckily for us is that when you set up your if you have your your website structure and the links are there and you download Yoast, and it will create the sitemap for the search engines that they can use. And and basically like you’ll just make it easier for Google to find out what you know how to figure out how to find all the content on your site. So I’m gonna pause this video here or move on to the next section. I’ll see you guys there.