Bill Gates once famously wrote that ‘Content is King’, and in today’s super-competitive online world, his words are perhaps truer than ever. Having great, well-organized content on your site isn’t just important from a visitor’s point of view, but it will also help you rank higher in Google since the search engine started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand and prioritize websites better.
As most people would agree, there’s nothing worse than knowing what you’re looking for, going to a site, only to be left searching for it for hours. That’s also a surefire way to see your site visitors clicking the back button, never to return.
How to Organize Your Website Content
Whether you’re starting with a new-build site and are in the planning phase or you have a site already published that you want to improve, below are some key tips and stages you should complete to make sure your site is as intelligible and easy to use as possible.
Define the Structure of the Site
Before you even begin writing text, you should have a clear idea of how the site is going to be structured. You can think of this rather like a family tree, with pages branching out from under the homepage.
As a rule, you should put your most important pages or products and services right at the top of this tree, and perhaps even on the homepage, if that’s appropriate. For example, if your firm’s top-selling product is a medical air flow mattress, then it may well be an idea to feature this in a banner at the top of all pages.
Content Writing: Start with the Most Important First
Now you’ve got an idea of how your site and pages are going to be organized, you can begin thinking about generating the content for these pages. Again, it’s usually a good idea to start with the most important first, as this help focus your mind, and possibly gets you branching into other topics you perhaps hadn’t considered.
Keep Related Content and Pages Together
This point comes back to the family tree structure you defined at the start of the job. Grouping related content together will make it easier for your users to know where they are on your site and allow them to easily explore other pages or items that might be of interest.
In recent years, there’s been a growing trend for using mega-menus on websites, which is a great example of the concept of grouping your pages by type.
Remember to Keep Your Content Relevant
The key to good web design and development is to make it as easy as possible for your site visitors to find what they are looking for. This, after all, is the reason they came to your site. With this in mind, there’s little point bombarding them with information that they simply don’t need.
Rather, try to keep your text concise and paragraphs short, and remember to use informative heading tags to help split the page up and make it easier for your users to read.