An Introduction to SEO Architecture

What is SEO architecture?

SEO is made up of three important pillars – architecture, content and links. Content is of course the content of your website, including text, images, video and so on. Links are the external links to your website, and that’s where link building strategies come in. Architecture, then, is the way your website pages are structured and linked together and this affects the way search bots find pages on your website, as well as how users navigate your site.

What are the different types of website architecture?

Website architecture can be deep or flat – or indeed, somewhere in between. Essentially, deep or flat architecture relates to the structure of the website and how deep you need to go into the site to find the various pages. A site with a flat architecture will have links to each page from the homepage – every page on the website is just one click away, or it might even be a one-page website. Deep site architecture means the opposite – the website may have many layers to dig into in order to unearth those more buried pages that aren’t linked from the homepage and may be a few layers deep. Our blog post “What Is Deep Site Architecture In SEO?” explains in more detail.

Why is SEO architecture important?

The architecture of your website is important for both users and bots, and since we’re talking about SEO right now, we’re going to focus on the latter. While website architecture is important for the user experience, it’s also important for search bots because in order for your website pages to appear in search results, they first need to be found by search engines.

As we covered flat and deep architecture above, it may have occurred to you that a site with a flat architecture would be easiest for users and bots to navigate. This is true, but this isn’t practical for all websites due to the volume of content or features required – think lead generation versus ecommerce, for example. So for websites with many different page types and “layers” of these pages, it’s very important that the website is structured in a way that makes sense and allows there to be lots of links between pages. Otherwise, search bots might not find all of those buried pages very easily and this can impact which of your pages are crawled and indexed.

What are some SEO architecture best practices?

Here are five tips for creating a website architecture that will help you succeed in search results:

• If you’re about to build a new website, think about site architecture carefully as one of the first things you do, as it’s much easier to build those solid foundations right from the beginning.
• Ensure the most important pages are further up your hierarchy -in other words, link to those important pages from the homepage. If your pages are buried beneath other layers of your site and there are hardly any links to them, this is a signal to Google that they might not be as important as the pages that are more easily accessible.
• Check for good cross-links between pages and build this into elements of your pages that feature in multiple places across your website, such as headers and footers, breadcrumb trails and different page types such as product or category pages.
• Think about what’s easy for the user, as this is still extremely important and generally if what you’re doing is good for your users, good SEO will follow.
• Create an SEO-friendly URL structure that explains where the page is in relation to other pages and the layout of your website.

For further reading on website structure, take a look at our blog post “Why Is Good Website Structure Important For SEO?”

If you would like any help with your SEO architecture, get in touch with SilverDisc.