What is website architecture?
Website-In architecture, the pages of a website are structured and linked together.
Website architecture is one of the best known SEO Basics.
An ideal website architecture helps users and search engine crawlers to easily find what they are looking for on a website.
Why is website architecture important for SEO?
Three reasons:
Reason No. 1: An optimized website architecture helps search engines like Googleto find and index all pages of your website.
If you have pages on your website that are several clicks away from your homepage (or are not linked from any other page), it will be difficult for the Googlebot to find and index these pages.
However, if your website architecture is interconnected, Google crawlers can follow your internal links to 100% of the pages on your site.
Reason No. 2: Website architecture sends link authority around your website.
When you create an internal link to high-priority pages, more link authority (PageRank) is transferred to those pages.
Which can help improve their rankings in Google.
Reason No. 3: The right website architecture makes it easy for visitors to find what they need on your website.
(Which can indirectly help your SEO)
Website Architecture Tips & Tricks
Use internal links
Ultimately, your site architecture is determined by how your pages are linked.
Therefore, you would like to create a link to your category pages via a navigation menu.
And from category pages to individual pages within that category.
Note: Use HTML for navigation
You may also want to use internal links to link the content of your website to other pages of your website.
These internal links are not only related to SEO.
They also help users learn more about the topic we are discussing.
Note: Make sure your navigation links are HTML… not JS or Flash.
Although Google can partially crawl and index JavaScript, you definitely want your navigation links to be HTML code.
Use a sitemap
A Sitemap This is also a great way to improve the "crawlability" of your website.
Furthermore, you can visualize all categories, subcategories, and pages of your website.
Here is an example:
Sitelinks
Sidelinks are another bonus you get from a strong site architecture.
There is no structured data markup for page links.
They will be performed automatically if your site is authoritative and networked.
Keep things simple
This is not particularly important if you run a blog or a website with hundreds of pages.
However, once you add thousands (of tens of thousands) of different pages to your site, the simplicity is HUGE.
We cannot tell you how often we find websites with a very complicated page architecture like this one.
This is not only bad for SEO, it's also a bad user experience.
Imagine you have just landed on a random page of this website.
How likely is it that you will find a page that you actually need?
Virtually zero.
However, if your website architecture is simple, it's SUPER easy for users to visit your site to find out what they need.
For this reason, you want to establish a website hierarchy from day one.
Stay tuned as your website grows.
Most websites with a complex website architecture didn't start this way.
They started adding random categories, subdomains, and pages… which resulted in a confusing mess.
Use a "flat" website architecture
In general, a "flat" website architecture is better for SEO.
A flat architecture means that users (and search engine crawlers) can reach any page of your website with a maximum of four clicks.
On the other hand, a "deep" website architecture means that certain pages require 4-10 additional clicks to reach.
Why is that important?
Firstly, a flat page architecture means that link authority flows from pages that tend to contain many backlinks (like your homepage) to pages that you want to rank (like a product page).
Secondly, a flat architecture means that Google spiders can find all web pages on your website (thus maximizing your crawl budget).
Use category pages
Category pages make organizing your website's architecture extremely easy in the long run.
Would you like to start a new page?
Add it to an existing category.
And link from this category page.
Would you like to add a few new pages?
Create a new category.
And link to the new pages of this new category page.
Without the category structure, pages are added randomly…
Which usually leads to a complicated page architecture.
Note: If you are running a relatively small site (less than 1,000 pages), you may not need to organize things by categories.
URL structure
Your URL structure should logically follow your categories.
Here is an example of a URL structure that is used by many websites:
https://beispiel.ch/kategorie/subkategorie/keyword1-xy/
Your URLs don't have to look exactly like this.
However, it is important that all your URLs have the same structure.
