Best structure for a news website including main menu nav
-
Just looking for thoughts and opinions on the best way to set up the main nav on a news website that covers a specific professional services sector.
There are news items, archived news, blog, events, but also main menu links to the numerous news categories that go to a page listing the news articles under that category (as created in Wordpress when publishing the article).
I'm thinking that having these off the main nav is diluting the juice to the more important pages including the events and the news page?
Just thinking about how to rearrange and consolidate. Any thoughts on how people would structure something like this?
-
Not a problem, I always try to give a solid answer
Maybe you could do a compromise and have a "categories" entry that breaks down into the main categories (but not all of them) or something like that. Always remember, you can hedge your bets to test a bit!
Having every news category in the top-line nav, breaking down into sub categories could be excessive. It's a shame that triple-expansion nav never caught on (then you could have categoires->category->sub-category on hover). Whilst that is technically feasible, it's not really very user friendly (at all) as it makes menus really jumpy and dysfunctional (in most instances anyway)
On lots of eCommerce sites now I notice that they have auto-completing product (or category) based pseudo-search bars. Like you'll type a bit of a word, and all the relevant products will come back and you click on one (instead of 'entering' the search, and seeing a page of results). Maybe you could innovate and create a similar thing for news stuff. Have people type a bit of a category (or tag / topic) and then pre-fill with a couple of categories and a load of articles (or something like that)
Just throwing out ideas. Not that yours is bad! Just always trying to think "how could this be more?"
-
Thanks - very detailed response and much appreciated.
This news site currently gets 40,000-50,000 users per month so there's already some good traffic numbers coming through.
The difference with this and the virgin structure is that all those pages lower down the URL structure will continue to be relevant for that site. Most of the users coming to this site are finding the latest news articles or know the brand already (direct traffic).
I think that it would be best to put all the different categories as a list on a 'news categories' page rather than have them all listed out on the main nav and distracting from the main areas of 'latest news' and 'events'.
Definitely food for thought there though. Fingers crossed it works!
-
This is a pretty good question and the answer can be variable depending upon the level of authority which your domain has currently accrued.
One of our employees always touts this site (not one of our clients) as having superb navigation:
There are several aspects to the navigation and URL structure - and how those different elements interact.
Even the faceted navigation impacts the URL structure, for example you can build very specific (niche) URLs like this just using the on-site UI:
- https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/multiple-car-experiences/yorkshire-and-humber/100-250/4-stars
So if you wanted to see driving 'experience days' for multi-car experiences (drive more than one car) within Yorkshire and Humber, which were between £100 and £250 with a 4-star or higher rating... the pages listed there would be the ones!
If you load that page, you can see that all of those things have been set in the sidebar based filtering (faceted) navigation. WordPress has issues in terms of reflecting faceted navigational choices properly in the URL structure, especially when more than faceted navigation filter is active. You then have to choose between pretty permalinks or having multiple filters accessible to users simultaneously, not ideal. Due to that I'm pretty sure some kind of bespoke (or heavily customised) CMS would have been used to get everything all working in one place as it should.
In addition to all that neat stuff, if you hover over the top menu entries you'll see that they expand and are pretty comprehensive. That's called a 'mega' menu and re-distributes SEO authority very efficiently, so long as all of the links are accessible in the 'base' (non-modified) source code. Surely this is just the way to go for everyone right?
WRONG!
The cited website obviously has the backing of Virgin and some pretty colossal promotional activity going on behind the scenes. That's not insider info, Virgin is a huge multinational corporation! Anyone examining their backlink profile using publicly available data would say the same thing.
If you're not already riding a very high SEO authority stream, chances are that this type of navigation could actually lower your ranking results.
If you have loads of authority, you can tip it down channels to really soak up a lot of long-tail traffic with this very granular type of site-architecture which leverages great navigational/URL-structure interplay.
On the other hand, if you are a smaller site (of any description) - it's like using an irrigation system with only one bucket of water to supply it. That bucket could have kept 2-3 plants alive for a few days, but spread evenly among hundreds of crops it makes literally no difference (and everything dies together, oh no!)
Implementing very advanced navigational structures too early can sometimes cause your small amount of SEO authority to 'bleed out' and achieve relatively little (or nothing) over thousands of pages.
It's great to be ambitious, and all of these great tactics can work (on any site, not just news or experience-day sites) but they all have a proper time of adoption. Adopt too early and you risk flattening your prior achievements in a void of poor results. Adopt too late and you risk being left behind as your peers take a chance and (potentially) make something more of themselves
It's not just what you do, it's when you do it (if that makes sense)
On a news site, or any other site - I'd say start simpler and as you accrue more SEO authority, redistribute it and gradually increase depth of navigation, URL structure and content granularity
Here is your basic decision:
- Flatter URL structure and condensed nav helps the site build up authority and win a few mid-to-high tier terms
- Deeper URL structure with expansive nav helps reap the long-tail and gain massive amounts of traffic, but only once your SEO authority reaches a certain threshold. Before that point, you'll just bleed out
Hope that helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I remove a high traffic page on my website?
For the last few years, a particular blog post on my site has gotten 3 times as much traffic than any other page, even the home page; however, the topic of the post is only moderately related to the website topic and I'm wondering if all that unrelated traffic is negatively effecting SEO for our primary keywords. Here's an example.... Site topic: Yoga retreats in Costa Rica (we want to attract people who are interested in booking a yoga retreat) Blog Topic: How to extend your visa in Costa Rica (it's related only because it's about Costa Rica and travel, and may help our visitors stay longer) Other Notes: In 4 years, visitors to that blog post have never converted. Blog post bounce rate is 56%, significantly higher than almost any other page Lots of comments on the blog post so visitors to it are engaged and find it very useful To get an accurate reading of interested visitors to the site, i always have to filter entrance visits to this post in my analytics because these users are not an accurate representation of the visitors we're trying to draw. My question: Because I get so much traffic from the blog post, which is about the visa renewal process, will Google consider the website less about yoga and more about visas? If so, will it make it more difficult to rank well for yoga in Costa Rica? Does Google say to itself, "Hey, this website can't be an authority about both yoga and visas in Costa Rica so we're going to consider it a visa site because of all the visits and engagement it gets for that topic." So should I remove the post or just leave it alone? It offers a lot of people valuable information so I would never delete it entirely, but would redirect it somewhere else. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Cabaretti0 -
Structural data is not showing SERP
Hi, I need your help please check i am trying to display site structural data but not showing in SERP after doing efforts, please tell me if i am missing something: https://kfoods.com/special_chicken_karahi_rid469
On-Page Optimization | | abrarpasha0 -
SEO for replicated website system
I have a client who has 750 agents. They want to provide them all with a website on a subdomain (mysite.domain.com). The sites will all contain basically the same info, however, this info can be customized on each site by each rep. Most of these reps sell pretty much the same thing, so the customization wont be very dramatic. So the question is, how can we build this replicated website system and deliver SEO value to each site?
On-Page Optimization | | gotchamobi0 -
To update or not to update news URLs ?
We manage a huge daily news website in my small country - keeping this a bit mysterious in case competitors are reading 🙂 Our URL structure is www.companyname.com/news/categoryofnews/title-of-article?id=articleid In this hyperreactive news world, title of articles change frequently (may be ten times a day for the main stories). The question we debate is : should we reflect the modification of the title in the URL or not ? Example : "Trump says he wants to ban search engines" would have URL http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678 Later in the day the title becomes "Trump denies he suggested banning search engines". Should the URL be modified to http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-denies-he-suggested-banning-search-engines?id=12345678 (option A) or not (option B) ? In Google News it makes no difference because of the sitemap, but in Google organic things are different. At present (option B in place), Google apparently doesn't see that the article has been updated, and shows the initial timestamp which is visually (and presumably SEOwise) not good : our new news looks like old news. Modifiying the URL would solve that issue, but could, may be, create another one : the new URL, being considered a new article, would lose, the acquired weight of the previous one in terms of referrals, social trafic and so on. Or not ? What do you think is the best option ? Thanks for your expertise, Yves
On-Page Optimization | | yves678901 -
Making best use of keyword phrase domain url
Hi everyone Our industry has a particular keyword phrase that is very popular. We currently own this as a domain name. How can we make use of this to our main websites advantage?
On-Page Optimization | | LadyApollo0 -
How to Define Best URL Structure for Product Pages?
I am working on my website to edit structure with help of Google's search engine optimization starter guide. There is really good instruction to define URL structure which help us to perform well over Google's organic search. I have resolved issues regarding category pages but, I have confusion to define best URL structure for product pages. My website's product page URL structure is as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.html http://www.vistastores.com/homefurniture-winsomewood-93630.html URL structure is constructed with following terms. 1. Root Category Name (Market Umbrellas or Home Furniture or ....) 2. Brand Name 3. Manufacturer Part Number I am not happy with this structure and also not performing well over Google's organic search. I am thinking to include product name or title tag in URL after root domain. But, it may create very long URL and create issues in organic search display. Does it really matter to perform well over Google's organic search? How can I define best URL structure for product pages?
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit0 -
What's the impact of # in the main domain page?
After a little research I did in the Source Code of the root domain page of seomoz.org and searchenginejournal.com , I found that the first one contains no at all and that the other contains like 10 . I though that the was something relatively important on a web page for on page optimisation. Did I missed something? What's you opinion on the subject? Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0