Your website structure is important - Don't ignore the SEO and user experience benefits!

How much importance do you put on your website's structure? How well did you plan everything with the designer, coder, and SEO when you first started working on your website?

If you didn't put an effort into having an optimized website structure you might have a problem! 

I recently got a new client that had a rather serious problem: he couldn't fully index his website in Google. Nothing was wrong with the site itself, decent design, decent enough content, nothing blocked in robots.txt and no pages flagged with the no-index tag, but still, the majority of pages weren't index by Google. 

Why? Because it took me over 5 clicks to reach one specific product page and to top it all of the websites had all sorts of redirects in place plus it was a multi-language website but he decided to use folders instead of subdomains. Anyways the URL structure of one product looked like this: website.com/en/products/category/subcategory/product-name - I'm guessing the Google crawler stopped somewhere in the subcategory listing page. Why? Because a crawler will go through a limited session of redirects and a limited number of website levels before it quits and stops crawling.

I fixed everything by redesigning the website's structure and by removing useless redirects. After this implementation, the website got fully index with all of its products in a few hours time. 

This is a valuable lesson to everything that owns a website. Having a simple, clearly defined structure is essential both for search engine but also for users! 
This is my rule: For a website structure to be optimal, you need to be able to get anywhere on the website within three to four clicks. If it takes more than this, I may want to rethink the website's structure. 

So, let's put this into perspective, for an optimal website structure you need to:

• Think of the users and how exactly you are helping them, they need to understand the content tight away and be able to navigate your website without any issues or special instructions. 
• Every page should be at a three clicks distance, four at the most. 
• Search Engine crawlers may give up crawling on websites that have 4 or more levels
• Don't ignore the number of redirects a crawler needs to do if it finds a series of redirects it will give up pretty fast in crawling the website. 
• It generally needs to make sense in the simple way of thinking. 
• Don't forget about sitemaps, the sitemap needs to fully present the exact structure of the websites, without any errors or dead ends. Test your sitemap in Google search Console and also review it manually and make sure everything is right from a hierarchical point of view.