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Amol Ghemud Published: August 12, 2019
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What is Website Architecture?
Website Architecture is basically how website pages are structured and linked together. An ideal Website Architecture helps users and search engine crawlers easily find what they’re looking for on a website.
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Learn how to structure your site for better crawling, indexing, and user experience.
Why Is Website Architecture Important for SEO?
1) Optimized website design helps computer program spiders notice and index all of the pages on your web site.
If you’ve got pages on your website that square measure many clicks from your homepage (or not coupled from the other page at all), Googlebot can have a tough time finding and compartmentalization those pages.
Image: Pages several clicks away from homepage may not be indexed
Pages many clicks aloof from the homepage might not be indexed
But if your website design it interlinked, spiders will follow your internal links to 100% of your site’s pages.
2) Site design sends link authority around your web site.
When your internal link to high-priority pages, a lot of link authority (PageRank) can flow to those pages, which may facilitate improve their rankings in Google.
Internal linking to high priority pages suggests that a lot of authorities
3) The right website architecture design makes it simple for guests to search out what they have on your site.
(Which will indirectly facilitate along with your SEO)
What optimal site does architecture look like?
Google likes short URLs, however, it additionally likes a way of order. Therefore, there’s no right answer to the present question — solely tips.
Once structuring a web site, we have a tendency to try and keep the pages quite flat and don’t bury them in folder URLs like /site/, /pages/ or /category/, however if we’re grouping a collection of common themes, we’ll typically cluster these into a virtual folder/directory.
You’ll see this with our digital promoting services, like SEO (/digital-marketing/seo/) & PPC (/digital-marketing/ppc/).
With hottest content management systems like WordPress, adding breadcrumbs is easy. Navigation breadcrumbs and uniform resource locator patterns usually match up as good, and that’s the case if you employ Yoast’s Breadcrumbs, that also is nice for adding higher internal linking — additional on this later!
As a result, we’re proud of having our main service pages one level deep, below our digital promoting services page. Consider a web site with additional advanced design, just like the one embedded here.
Image: Advanced website design
Example website design is drawn with Writemaps
In this, the URLs for the vital pages — the product — would be buried in a minimum of 3 virtual directories that add nothing towards the ranking advantage of the page.
It’s been shown that having relevant keywords within the pathname and page slug/URL is useful to ranking the page for a given keyword, however, once a web site already has, or has the potential to possess associate unnecessarily long uniform resource locator, this could be seen as a look optimization chance.
At Impression, we’re huge fans of Writemaps for drawing sitemaps, however, there are lots of different free tools out there like Google Drawings. As Joost at Yoast points come in his article on the constant topic, it’s continually an honest plan to visualize the structure to make sure the positioning feels balanced.
Through drawing out a projected website design (and so uniform resource locator structure), you’ll notice any imbalance or pages which may be too deep, permitting you to correct the structure before you begin developing the positioning.
In fact, whether or not or not you anticipate your site’s structure being advanced, making a website map prior to of brand new site development or migration is usually best to follow.
Not solely will it permit you to spot potential problems with page depth and website imbalance, it additionally permits you to visualize the grouping of your content to make sure that it’s logical and accessible for each search engines and users.
If you’re performing on a project wherever you wish to log off from multiple individuals, a website map also will facilitate to make sure that everybody is in agreement on however the new site ought to be structured before an excessive amount of time is endowed in development.
Sites are slithered via web search tools, and these crawlers visit each site page individually in all respects rapidly while making duplicates of the pages. These duplicates are then put away in what is known as the file—which can be envisioned as a tremendous book of the web.
When somebody plays out a pursuit, the web index will glance through this enormous book and after that discover the majority of the pages important to the inquiry question and select the ones that give off an impression of being the best, and demonstrate those first.
So as to have your site found inside the list items, you need to really be in this famous book.
To be in the book, you should be slithered. When all is said in done most sites don’t have an issue with being found, yet there are sure things that will put a wrinkle all the while.
Blaze and JavaScript at times conceal joins—this makes it unthinkable for those pages (at the shrouded connections) to be crept, as they become escaped the web index. These projects can likewise shroud genuine substance on a page.
Every site is given what is known as a creep spending plan. This is an expected measure of time or number of pages that a web crawler may slither every day. This depends on the specialist and relative trust of a site.
Sites that are bigger might need to improve the effectiveness of their creeps to ensure that the ideal pages are being crept appropriately and all the more regularly.
Interior connection structures, robots.txt, and demonstrating to web indexes to not take an interest with explicit parameters are for the most part ways that the productivity of slithering can be improved.
Periodically, issues with slithering are effectively maintained a strategic distance from and by and large, it is a decent practice to utilize both HTML and XML sitemaps, making it simpler for web indexes to creep a site.
Logical Content Grouping
What constitutes the logical grouping mentioned in the last section, merely place, a site’s design ought to cluster URLs that have similar or connected content. the foremost obvious example is grouping merchandise at intervals constant class along, e.g:
/category-a/
category-a/product-1/
category-a/product-2/
This is a far better various to a less clear structure, that might appear as if /cat/category-a/ and /prod/product-1/ and would fail to speak the connection between the class and its merchandise. sadly (from Associate in Nursing SEO purpose of view) some content management systems (CMS) use the less clear structure as their default.
My most well-liked sort of structure may also be used for services and connected pages on a service-based lead generation website, with ‘child’ services nested below the most service, for example:
/business-law/
/business-law/business-fraud/
/business-law/trading-standards/
A good web site structure doesn’t mean that the different types of pages got to be separated. As we’ll see within the next section, proof points to there being an important price to as well as informational pages at intervals constant folders as service or class pages.
Architecture for Informational Content
Whether you’re siloing all of your content, some of it, or you’re maintaining an everyday weblog (which is certainly a viable possibility, particularly if you expect to be writing extensively a few wide selections of topics), it’s valuable to possess some pages of content that you simply bear in mind to be ‘evergreen’ (also known as ‘cornerstone,’ ‘10X’ and a range of alternative terms).
Unlike alternative informational content, particularly weblog posts, these pages are going to be updated incessantly to confirm that they’re invariably relevant. A method of pondering them is that they ought to contain data that you simply need each potential client to browse.
They ought to be valuable resources associated with your product and services that may have long attractiveness and therefore the ability to achieve links over time.
Crucially, evergreen content ought to be simply accessible inside your web site structure, whether or not it’s joined to form the most nav or siloed with connected classes or services.
It ought to even be internally joined to heavily, with links coming back in from each relevant business and informational page. this can facilitate users to search out their manners there and signal to go looking engines that these pages are vital.
Internal Links
Just like however external links to authoritative resources offer context to Google that your page should even be authoritative, Google takes your internal links as an indication of the importance and which means of each of your websites.
This structure is additionally why you ought to ne’er have associate “orphaned page” on your web site, and why pillar content pages should be connected within the page itself and throughout your web site – it offers it context and helps Google higher crawl and add up of the on-page material.
Any page that has no links in or out of it should not be that vital for users to urge to.
After all, the sole choice for them to try and do once they arrive is to click the back button – a giant SEO red flag.
URL Structure
Your URL structure ought to logically follow your classes.
Here’s an associate example of a url structure that a great deal of web sites use:
Your URLs don’t ought to look specifically like that. however it’s necessary that every one of your URLs follow a similar structure.
Keyword Targeting
When you’re designing your website design, it’s vital to try to to therefore with the muse of up to this point keyword analysis. mistreatment tools like Ahrefs, Adwords Keyword Planner and SEMRush, you’ll estimate what folks are sorting out in reference to any page you produce, whether or not they’re business or informational in nature.
Several components of a page ought to contain the first keywords that you just wish it to rank for, as well as the copy and also the data, however it may also be useful to incorporate the most keyword within the universal resource locator.
If doable, you ought to additionally avoid strings of numbers in a very key page’s universal resource locator, as this waters down the topical signals you’re causation Google.
Optimised URLs don’t seem to be as powerful ranking signals as they were within the past, however it’s higher to incorporate them than not.
User Experience
Well optimised URLs also can build your website easier for humans to navigate. The inclusion of the first keyword within the URL’s string is one vital part, serving to to speak the key topic of the page, however a logical folder structure, as delineated higher than, is additionally useful.
If your folder structure is descriptive (e.g. /coats/parkas/ instead of /category/parkas/), it helps users see that space of the web site they’re in and what else there is to explore. within the example given there, the actual fact that ‘coats’ is gift within the URL structure could encourage a user to explore a lot of of your product than if they solely targeted on parkas.
As with the SEO edges, the married woman edges to well-optimized URLs aren’t excessively impactful, however once you’re coming up with your website design from scratch it is smart to all or any the tiny details right the 1st time.
Conclusion
Incorporating all of those parts into your web site to boost its SEO can yield positive results. every one of those things can have a small impact within the overall performance, however once they are utilised along within the correct method, it’ll be a game-changer.
Every amendment that’s enforced can boost your site’s ranking in the search results, bit by bit, and once they are all formed, you’ll see the results. Website design for SEO isn’t one thing that should be tough and once you get the suspend of it, it’ll be the one thing that comes as a habit as your whole grows.
A logical website architecture acts as a roadmap for search engine crawlers, ensuring they can efficiently find and index every page. A clear structure guides Googlebot through your site, which is fundamental because pages that cannot be found cannot be ranked. An organized site design directly impacts how search engines perceive your content's importance and relevance.
A well-planned structure improves SEO performance in several key ways:
Enhanced Crawlability: A flat architecture with strong internal linking allows spiders to follow links and discover 100% of your pages, preventing orphan pages.
Link Authority Distribution: It funnels PageRank from authoritative pages like your homepage to more specific, high-priority service or product pages.
Improved User Experience: It helps visitors navigate your site intuitively, which can lead to longer dwell times and lower bounce rates, both positive signals for SEO.
By visualizing your sitemap with tools like Writemaps, you can proactively design a structure that supports your ranking goals. To learn how to avoid common pitfalls that leave pages buried, explore the full article.
A strong website architecture is foundational because it directly controls the flow of link authority, or PageRank, throughout your site. Without a deliberate structure, this authority gets distributed unevenly, leaving your most important commercial pages without the SEO strength they need to rank well. It is a strategic tool for signaling page importance to search engines.
Your architecture dictates how link equity is passed from high-authority pages to deeper pages. An effective internal linking strategy built on this structure is essential. For example, if you want your SEO services page to rank, it should be prominently linked from related, authoritative content. Companies like Impression use this by linking to service pages from their main digital marketing hub, concentrating authority where it matters most. A planned structure ensures your most valuable pages receive the ranking power they require. Read on to see how to map this flow visually.
The primary trade-off between a flat and deep architecture is balancing crawl efficiency with organizational clarity. A flat architecture, where most pages are only a few clicks from the homepage, is excellent for ensuring Googlebot can easily find and index content while spreading PageRank more evenly. However, for large sites, it can become disorganized for users.
A deeper, hierarchical structure offers superior organization but comes with its own challenges. Consider these factors when choosing your approach:
User Navigation: Deep structures with breadcrumbs, which can be easily implemented with a tool like Yoast, can help users understand where they are on a large e-commerce or service site.
Crawl Depth: Pages buried too many clicks deep may be crawled less frequently or not at all, diluting their SEO potential.
Topical Authority: Grouping related content into virtual directories helps establish topical relevance for that entire section of the site.
The ideal solution often involves a hybrid approach, keeping high-priority pages flat while organizing extensive content into logical directories. The full guide explains how to find this balance for your specific needs.
This URL structure exemplifies a balanced architecture by providing organizational clarity without burying important pages too deeply. It tells users and search engines exactly what the page is about and where it fits within the site's hierarchy, which is a best practice recommended by SEO experts at companies like Yoast. This approach makes the user journey logical and predictable.
This strategy offers distinct SEO advantages. Keywords in the URL path, like "digital-marketing" and "seo," serve as direct ranking signals. By grouping all digital marketing services under a single parent directory, the structure builds topical authority for that entire section, making each individual service page within it stronger. It also ensures that these crucial service pages are only one click away from a primary navigation hub, facilitating the flow of PageRank and ensuring they are easily discovered by crawlers. Discover more examples of effective URL patterns in the complete analysis.
Implementing breadcrumbs with a tool like the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress is a powerful way to reinforce your site's architecture. For users, breadcrumbs provide a clear navigational trail, showing them exactly where they are within your site's hierarchy and allowing them to easily navigate back to higher-level pages. This improves the overall user experience and reduces frustration.
For search engines, breadcrumbs offer two major benefits. First, they create an additional set of contextual internal links on every page, which helps Googlebot understand the relationship between pages and spreads link authority more effectively. Second, Google often uses this structured data to display rich snippets in search results. This can increase click-through rates from the SERP. By reflecting your URL structure, breadcrumbs make your site's logic explicit to both people and crawlers. Learn how to combine this with other internal linking strategies by reading more.
A B2B company should map its architecture visually before any development begins to ensure key service pages receive maximum SEO benefit. This proactive planning prevents pages from becoming buried and ensures a logical flow of authority. Using a visual sitemapping tool simplifies this process and helps align all stakeholders on the final structure.
Follow this four-step plan for a successful redesign:
Identify High-Priority Pages: List all your core service pages and supporting content like case studies and blog posts that drive conversions.
Group Content Logically: Organize these pages into parent categories or virtual folders, for instance, under a `/services/consulting/` directory.
Visualize the Hierarchy: Use a tool like Writemaps or Google Drawings to create a visual sitemap, confirming no key page is more than three clicks away from the homepage.
Plan Your URL Structure: Define a clean, keyword-rich URL pattern that matches the visual hierarchy you created.
This structured approach ensures your most valuable pages are positioned for optimal crawling and authority flow. Dive deeper into our guide for more advanced tips on structuring complex service websites.
While the core principles of a logical, crawlable hierarchy will remain, the focus will increasingly shift toward topic-centric structures over simple page-level organization. As search engines like Google get better at understanding context, sites organized around topic clusters will gain an advantage. This means building a strong central pillar page for a main topic and linking out to more specific sub-topic pages.
To future-proof your site, prioritize these three areas:
Topical Authority: Move beyond individual keywords and structure your content around broader themes. A tool like Writemaps can help visualize these content hubs.
User Intent Alignment: Ensure your architecture mirrors the user journey, from awareness to conversion, making navigation intuitive.
Structured Data: Use schemas, including breadcrumb schema, to explicitly define your site's structure for search engines.
The emphasis will be on demonstrating expertise through a deeply interconnected and logical content structure. Explore the full article for insights on how to start building these topic clusters today.
A frequent and critical mistake is creating an excessively deep architecture where important pages are buried five or more clicks from the homepage. This "deep" structure severely hinders Googlebot's ability to discover and crawl those pages regularly, leading to poor or non-existent indexing. It also means that very little PageRank flows down to these pages, crippling their ability to rank.
The solution is to adopt a flatter, more interconnected structure. Your goal should be to keep every important page within three to four clicks of the homepage. This is achieved through:
Strategic Internal Linking: Actively link from high-authority pages directly to deeper, high-priority pages.
Logical Categorization: Use well-organized category pages to serve as hubs, as demonstrated by the agency Impression.
Visual Auditing: Regularly map your site structure with a tool like Google Drawings to identify and correct sections that have become too deep over time.
This approach ensures crawlers can reach 100% of your valuable content and that link authority is distributed effectively. Our full guide provides a checklist for auditing your own site's depth.
Disorganized and long URLs negatively impact SEO by being difficult for both users and search engines to interpret. They often lack relevant keywords, appear untrustworthy in search results, and dilute the focus of the page. An unnecessarily long URL is a missed optimization opportunity, as keywords in the pathname are a known ranking factor.
Correcting this requires a careful restructuring process. The key is to map old URLs to new ones using permanent 301 redirects. This passes the link authority from the old URL to the new one and ensures users are not met with a 404 error. The steps are:
Plan a new, logical URL structure using tools like Writemaps.
Create a spreadsheet mapping every old URL to its new, optimized counterpart.
Implement 301 redirects on your server for every URL change.
Submit an updated sitemap to Google Search Console to expedite crawling.
This systematic approach allows you to improve your site architecture while preserving your hard-earned rankings. For a detailed guide on executing redirects, continue reading.
For a large e-commerce site, poor architecture can be commercially devastating, leading directly to lost revenue. If new or niche product pages are buried deep within complex category filters, Googlebot may not have enough crawl budget to find and index them, meaning they will never appear in search results. This makes a significant portion of the catalog invisible to potential buyers.
A proper structure resolves this by creating clear paths for crawlers. A well-designed site ensures that even the most specific product page is no more than a few clicks away from the homepage. E-commerce sites achieve this with:
Logical Category Pages: Creating clear main categories and subcategories that are linked from the main navigation.
Faceted Navigation: Implementing crawlable filter links that allow crawlers to discover product variations.
Internal Linking from Blog Content: Writing articles that link to relevant product pages.
Visualizing the site with a tool like Writemaps helps identify these deep-seated product pages before they become a problem. Discover how to audit your e-commerce site structure in our detailed guide.
While technical crawlability remains essential, a modern approach to website architecture must equally prioritize intuitive human navigation. Google's algorithms increasingly reward sites that satisfy user intent and provide a positive experience, which includes how easily users can find information. A confusing structure leads to high bounce rates and low engagement, which can indirectly harm rankings.
Future design choices should be human-centric. This means your site structure should mirror how a user would logically search for information. Key priorities include:
User Journey Mapping: Design navigation paths that align with your customer's journey from discovery to conversion.
Clear Navigational Elements: Use descriptive menu labels and helpful breadcrumbs, easily added with tools like Yoast.
Mobile-First Structure: Ensure the architecture is simple and easy to navigate on smaller screens, where clutter is more frustrating.
The goal is a design where the most efficient path for a crawler is also the most logical path for a user. Read the full post to see how to test your site's usability.
A well-planned URL structure acts as a clear, descriptive address for each piece of content, reinforcing the site's hierarchy for both users and search engines. It is a fundamental component of on-page SEO, providing strong contextual clues about a page's topic before it is even crawled. It directly supports the logic established by your sitemap and internal linking.
Strategic use of its components enhances SEO. Keywords in the URL slug are a confirmed ranking factor. Furthermore, virtual folders help establish topical relevance across a group of related pages. For example:
Clear Hierarchy: A URL like `/services/seo/audit` immediately tells Google the page is about an SEO audit, which is a type of SEO service.
Improved User Experience: Short, readable URLs are easier for users to understand, remember, and share.
Enhanced CTR: A clean URL can look more trustworthy in search results.
Tools like Yoast on WordPress make it simple to manage these structures and align them with breadcrumbs. Learn more about optimizing your URLs in the full article.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
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