This is How Search Engines Categorize Each Piece of Content

To understand why the categorization of content is important and why URL structure is important within this paradigm of categorization, let’s look at an example…

Let’s say there is a business in Portland, Oregon that sells bicycles. Let’s say their website is www.bestbikespdx.com.

That business wants to rank in Google for their content around different questions that users might have about bicycles. For example, they’ve written content about how to change a bicycle tire, the correct hand signals to use when riding your bicycle on the road, and which models of bicycles are best for which types of riders.

When Google is crawling their website, it’s trying to figure out how the website is structured. And, for the sake of this example, let’s argue that this bicycle shop has structured their content properly.

First, they have a “how to” section on their website. Within that category, they’ve created a lot of content such as…

• How to change a bicycle tire
• How to readjust bicycle handlebars
• How to fix a bicycle chain
• How to add safety lights to your bicycle

Because this content is easily categorized, they’ve optimized their URL structure to align with Google’s best practices. 

How did they do that?

It’s pretty straightforward. They shared links to all of their how-to articles on one page. The URL structure of that page is below:

www.bestbikespdx.com/how-to/

Whenever a new how-to article is published, it automatically shows up as the most recent article on this category page. Not only is this awesome for categorization of content, but it also keeps that page fresh, which is a ranking factor that Google likes.

Then, each of the how-to articles is nested underneath this parent page. Basically, it’s categorized underneath this parent page. 

So, here’s an example of what a how-to article’s URL structure would look like:

www.bestbikespdx.com/how-to/change-a-bicycle-tire/

It’s pretty simple!