How to structure SEO friendly information architecture

Any website has a crucial element to be taken care of in its build-up phase which is its information architecture. If the data or content of a website is organized in a search engine friendly way, the results will be very positive from an online perspective.

Designing a site’s architecture for high ranking may be the SEO objective, but a bigger objective than that is to make it soundly usable and customer converting. The latter two have much to do with the logics of customers regarding the extent of website use.

Site structure for search:

There is a need to generate “link equity” for your site. For this, there are two types of links: on-site links, notably those in the site’s tool bar or navigation bars, and inbound links pointing at your home page. But, it is important to determine how much to link and when.

A site that is well-structured tends to focus on a single overall major theme, and from that theme branches out different pages that are continually more focused, specific, and relevant to the overarching topic of the site.

What is more, search engine crawlers will primarily tend to crawl links that are at most three or four clicks away from your homepage. Thus, you should strive to keep your most important content within those 3-4 tiers.

SEO-friendly URL structures:

Getting a site layout wherein the location of individual pages is logical and intelligible to both visitors and search engines is often best accomplished by sticking to static URLs. This will have advantages such as reduction or elimination of crawling problems associated with dynamic, parameterized URLs. You need to have a URL that’s more communicable, which means short and memorable. Also, if your most relevant keywords have been incorporated into your URL and directory structure, it will help search engines to know what your page is about, bolded keywords in the SERPs will result in potentially more clicks, and search engine ranking of a page will be benefited as your most important keywords will be included in the link anchor text. Another thing to take care is to prevent the accidental creation of infinite spaces and curb and eliminate duplicate content.

The extensive and interesting field of information architecture spans the internet and SEO to a great extent, and understanding its importance is very important to serve the actual purpose of a website, i.e. marketing and/or sales.