How to Create the Optimal Website Structure - Business 2 Community |
| How to Create the Optimal Website Structure - Business 2 Community Posted: 28 Sep 2019 09:03 AM PDT The structure of your website influences the experience of the people who visit it. I often find myself wanting to leave a website when it becomes challenging to find the information I am looking for. And this is what you want to avoid at all costs. To start this discussion today, let me first cover the basics of website architecture. After which, we can delve deeper into the tips that can help you optimize your website structure. This way, you can ensure your visitors have the best experience possible, making them more likely to return to your site. What is Website Structure?In essence, a website structure is how your content is grouped, linked, and presented to visitors to your site. For example, if you are running an e-commerce site, you might have:
You need to organize your website in such a way that it is easy for people, and Google's spiders to navigate. The way you organize all of this content to make it easy to navigate is your website structure.
Website Structure and User ExperienceUser experience relates to the overall experience you provide to a person visiting your website. It's about how engaging your content is, how quickly to page loads, etc. A core part of the user experience for a person visiting a website is the structure. Companies usually try to design their websites so that they are easy to navigate. For example, if you were running an e-commerce store, then you want your products to be easy to find. On the other hand, if you are running a blog, then you want to make it easy for a person to sign up to your email list. A good website structure, while offering a better user experience, also has clear SEO benefits. For example, a website that is easy for a person to navigate is also easy for a Google Spider to navigate. This makes it easy for Google to index your content. Moreover, several website metrics that are closely related to your user experience and website architecture are ranking factors on Google. For example, a high bounce rate can negatively impact your search rankings. This is because Google understands people are visiting your website, not finding what they want, and going to a different resource. 4 Steps to Improve Your Website StructureAt this stage, you will understand why your website structure is so important. In the section below, I'll walk you through four steps you can take to improve your website structure so you can provide a better user experience. In addition to this, the changes I'll outline can also help improve your rankings in the SERPs. 1) Plan Out Your Website HierarchyThe hierarchy of a website, simplified, is the outline of your website pages and how they relate to each other. For example, the menu structure at the top of your page. This is the first way your users will seek to find the content relevant to them. Therefore, careful consideration must include decisions on what to include in this menu and how to present it to your audience. Additionally, there should be planning around the hierarchy that exist within your website structure as well. For example, how would you categorize content from your Blog so it's easy for people to navigate? 2) Make Sure Your Content Is 3 Clicks from the HomepageThe unofficial three-click rule tells us that users should be able to find the information they are looking for within three mouse clicks from the homepage. The way you manage this will vary from website to website and is impacted by the amount of content on the site. For instance, ecommerce websites that sells a wide range of products will often have a similarly large number of links in the menu. This is because they want people to navigate from the homepage to the product pages in the shortest number of clicks.
In the screenshot of boohoo's menu structure above, shirts for men are categorized, arranged by size and presented in collections so that the shopper can browse and purchase with ease. SaaS companies often favor less links on the menu. This is because they want to channel the visitor to a limited number of pages on the sites. While this will help with sales, it causes issues for SEO.
Register Now In the above example, Hubspot shows us an effective method of arranging and presenting content from various parts of the website – from the about us page to the blog, for easy navigation. To accommodate this, you will need to interlink between your content more frequently. This will help ensure that the majority of the site content is just three clicks from the homepage. 3) Create a Comprehensive Internal Linking StructureIt is also necessary to internally link between your content. This is useful for the following three reasons:
Keep in mind the three-click rule to make sure your important content is easy to access. This can be done effectively by dividing your pages into different content zones.
For example, sidebars and pagination menus are great places to present your reader with options without sacrificing the readability of your pages. These content zones help arrange content into smaller digestible parts and often points users to useful pages that you know they will probably want to access. In the example derived from the Yoast SEO website (below), a footer menu area proves very handy for just that.
4) Create a Clear URL StructureA well-crafted URL structure provides both humans and machines clues as to what your pages are about, but also where your content is within the overall structure of the website. This is where categories come into play. Let's take the example of an e-commerce website again. Categorization is the way websites can present items in logical sequence. For example; mens clothing is broken down into mens tops and then further subdivided into groups like t-shirts or sweatshirts.
If you review the URL structure you can see that content has been siloed into different groups. Let's break this down quickly by taking a close look at the URL below:
You can see the content has been siloed into three groups:
This siloing makes it easy for the person browsing the site to know where they are. Just as importantly, it makes it easy for Google Spiders to crawl the site. An added advantage of this website structure is that each of these siloes can support relevant keywords in a content pyramid. In ConclusionYour website's structure matters because you don't want the important stuff buried deep where nobody can find it. To sum it up;
These tips, if used correctly will help Google index your website nicely so that visitors to your website can find the right information easily and stay on your site longer. We leave you with one last thought, keep it simple. A clear navigational structure is not only at the order of the day, but also beneficial for your business in the long run.  |
| Google Is Fined $170 Million for Violating Children’s Privacy on YouTube - The New York Times Posted: 04 Sep 2019 12:00 AM PDT  Google agreed on Wednesday to pay a record $170 million fine and make changes to protect children's privacy on YouTube, as regulators said the video site had knowingly and illegally harvested personal information from children and used it to profit by targeting them with ads. Critics denounced the agreement, dismissing the fine as paltry and the required changes as inadequate for protecting children's privacy. The penalty and changes were part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and New York's attorney general, which had accused YouTube of violating the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. Regulators said that YouTube, which is owned by Google, had illegally gathered children's data — including identification codes used to track web browsing over time — without their parents' consent. The site also marketed itself to advertisers as a top destination for young children, even as it told some advertising firms that they did not have to comply with the children's privacy law because YouTube did not have viewers under 13. YouTube then made millions of dollars by using the information harvested from children to target them with ads, regulators said. To settle the charges, YouTube agreed to the $170 million penalty, with $136 million going to the trade commission and $34 million to New York State. It is the largest civil penalty ever obtained by the commission in a children's privacy case, dwarfing the previous record fine of $5.7 million against the owner of the social video-sharing app TikTok this year. Under the settlement, which the F.T.C. approved in a 3-to-2 vote, YouTube also agreed to create a system that asks video channel owners to identify the children's content they post so that targeted ads are not placed in such videos. YouTube must also obtain consent from parents before collecting or sharing personal details like a child's name or photos, regulators said. The move is the latest enforcement action taken by regulators in the United States against technology companies for violating users' privacy, indicating the Trump administration's willingness to aggressively pursue the powerful corporations. It follows a $5 billion privacy settlement between the trade commission and Facebook in July over how the company collected and handled user data. But critics of the settlement, including Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, described the $170 million penalty as a slap on the wrist for one of the world's richest companies. Image "The F.T.C. let Google off the hook with a drop-in-the-bucket fine and a set of new requirements that fall well short of what is needed to turn YouTube into a safe and healthy place for kids," Mr. Markey said in a statement. Children's advocates who lodged their own privacy complaint against YouTube with the F.T.C. last year said that Google had simply agreed to abide by a children's privacy law it was already obligated to comply with. COPPA prohibits operators of online services from collecting personal data, like home addresses, from children under 13 without a parent's verifiable permission. "Merely requiring Google to follow the law, that's a meaningless sanction," said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group whose efforts in the 1990s helped lead to the passage of the children's privacy law. "It's the equivalent of a cop pulling somebody over for speeding at 110 miles an hour, and they get off with a warning." The agreement split the trade commission along partisan lines, with the agency's three Republican commissioners voting to approve it and the two Democratic commissioners dissenting. In a statement, two of the Republican commissioners, Joseph J. Simons, the agency's chairman, and Christine S. Wilson, said that the settlement "achieves a significant victory for the millions of parents whose children watch child-directed content on YouTube." They said it was the first time a platform would have to ask its content producers to identify themselves as creators of children's material. The agreement, they added, "sends a strong message to children's content providers and to platforms about their obligation to comply with the COPPA rule." Although the settlement prohibits YouTube and Google from using or sharing children's data they have already obtained, Rohit Chopra, a Democratic commissioner, said that it did not hold company executives personally accountable for illegal mining of children's data. The other Democratic commissioner, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, said that the agreement did not go far enough by requiring YouTube itself to proactively identify children's videos on its platform. "No individual accountability, insufficient remedies to address the company's financial incentives and a fine that still allows the company to profit from its lawbreaking," Mr. Chopra wrote in his dissent. "The terms of the settlement were not even significant enough to make Google issue a warning to its investors." COPPA, the strongest federal consumer privacy statute in the United States, gives the trade commission the authority to level fines of up to $42,530 for each violation. Noah Phillips, a Republican member of the commission, argued that Congress should give the agency more guidance about how to levy fines. In a blog post on Wednesday about the settlement, YouTube's chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, said that "nothing is more important than protecting kids and their privacy." She added, "From its earliest days, YouTube has been a site for people over 13, but with a boom in family content and the rise of shared devices, the likelihood of children watching without supervision has increased." YouTube said that not only had it agreed to stop placing targeted ads on children's videos, it would also stop gathering personal data about anyone who watched such videos, even if the company believed that the viewer was an adult. The company also said it would eliminate features on children's videos, like comments and notifications, that involved the use of personal data. In addition to relying on reports from video creators, Ms. Wojcicki said that YouTube planned to use artificial intelligence to try to identify content that targeted young audiences, like videos featuring children's toys, games or characters. Under the settlement, YouTube must adopt the changes by early next year. The privacy case against YouTube began in 2016 after the New York attorney general's office, which has been active in enforcing the federal children's privacy law in the state, notified the trade commission about apparent violations of the law on the site. "Google and YouTube knowingly and illegally monitored, tracked and served targeted ads to young children just to keep advertising dollars rolling in," Letitia James, New York's attorney general, said in a statement on Wednesday. "These companies put children at risk and abused their power." Google has been forced to deal with privacy violations repeatedly in recent years. The company is subject to a 20-year federal consent order signed in 2011 for deceptive data-mining related to Buzz, a now-defunct social network. The order required Google to establish a comprehensive privacy program and prohibited it from misrepresenting how it handles personal data. In 2012, Google agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle trade commission charges that it had violated the 2011 order by deceiving users of Apple's Safari browser about its data-mining practices. The company is also the subject of a lawsuit brought by Hector Balderas, New Mexico's attorney general, over accusations that it violated children's privacy. The suit says the company failed to ensure that children's apps available through its Google Play store complied with the children's privacy law. Google has asked that the case be dismissed. The settlement on Wednesday is likely to have implications beyond YouTube. The changes required under the agreement could limit how much video makers earn on the platform because while they still make money on some kinds of ads on children's videos, they no longer be able to profit from ads targeted at children. To offset some of the expected losses, YouTube said it would funnel $100 million to creators of children's content over the next three years. It said it would also heavily promote YouTube Kids, its child-focused app, to shift parents away from using the main YouTube app when allowing their children to watch videos. The crackdown on creators of children's content could make it financially difficult to produce such videos, said Maureen Ohlhausen, a former acting chairwoman of the trade commission. "There is a lot of free content available for children," she said. "You want to be sure that you don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg."  |
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