Pillars and Clusters

Whether it is known to most or not, the most important thing someone can do to make their website appear closer to the top of more user’s search bars is to simply make it neat. Search engines search through content with what is called a crawler. A search engine crawler quickly scans through countless web pages in mere moments; while the crawler scans these articles it tends to favor websites with neatly organized web pages. For this reason, steadily organized structures of a website’s pages are important to not only the appeal to a customer but also to the appeal of the crawler. The best organization method for appealing to a crawler is pillars and clusters. The structure of pillars and clusters can be better understood by the laid out picture below

Pillars

As can be seen in the picture above, the pillar is the core of a properly organized website. Overall a pillar is a web page that is composed of many hyperlinks that lead to other web pages. These other web pages are the clusters.

Clusters

While the pillar is the core of all the web pages the clusters are the smaller subpages that are all directly linked to the pillar webpage to discuss the pillar’s listed subtopics.

Consequences of Not Using Pillars and Clusters

Most website creators do not take the time to properly organize their web page’s content which often causes the structure of the website to look something like the picture down below. Although the crawler will see that there is a pillar for a web page it will not favor the fact that the clusters are randomly thrown about rather than directly attached to the pillar.