This post used to be 2 very in-depth posts on how to set up the blog structure.
That’s because when I first started this post, the structure was really important. For example, I had two different options: The Wide Structure and The Blog Structure.
The Wide Structure was for blogs that targeted multiple different categories.
The Blog Structure was for blogs that targeted a single category.
The Wide Structure was complicating and required a technical set up of the homepage.
Something like this:
As you can see, everything is organized into their respective category.
It made things messy, complicating, and difficult for people to do.
But I kept it in because it was important and helped with optimal site architecture for SEO.
NOT ANYMORE.
Today, my structure/layout/organization for EVERY blog I run and every new blog I start is the same: An extremely simple blogroll.
It looks identical to this style:
Just a simple rolling blog roll. The zoomed out screenshot is making the text look weird. You can check out the site here – https://www.bustle.com/
And one other thing I started doing is just ditching the sidebar until I have something worthy of putting in there. So at least for the first year, my blogs are really simple, clean, one-column sites.
But what about internal links to Pillar Posts?
This is another thing that’s changed over the past couple of years.
Linking to your important pages on your sidebar used to give a small push in your rankings. You just had a ton of internal links to it.
Today, it doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore. Once you publish it, you’re done. There’s no need to give it importance by linking to it from your homepage or sidebar UNLESS the keyword is SUPER competitive and you need every single edge you can get.
However, I would definitely go into my old articles and use internal linking to link to that newly published article. Thatʼll speed up indexing and youʼll get a better chance of acquiring those rankings sooner.
The site in the example above is Bustle.com. It’s a site I have studied a LOT. And I mean a lot. Everything from the founder’s history and background to their content publishing strategy.
They are one of the biggest players in Google when it comes to media and entertainment.
They rank for 6 million keywords in Google and get an estimated 15.6 million visitors per month from search. And that’s just a SEMrush estimate. Their estimates are usually off anywhere between 5-10x. AND this is just US traffic. Worldwide is multiple times this.
Bustle’s founder, Bryan Goldberg, is who I learned my new site structure approach from. And I’m so grateful I did because it makes running my blogs so much simpler and easier.
This structure just… makes sense. And as you can see, it’s working out great for Bustle.
What about the homepage blog structure?
For me, I go one of two ways.
- Make the homepage a blogroll.
- Make the homepage a full-page email opt-in landing page and put my blog on www.website.com/blog/.
Unless you have a specific reason not to, make your homepage your blogroll.