But sometimes you gain new insights after you thought you had it nailed. Or, you may find yourself working on a website that needs structural help thanks to legacy decisions by a previous team.Whether your site needs a few tweaks or you’re planning an overhaul, it pays to take a good look at website information architecture.In this article:
  • What is site architecture?
  • Best practices in SEO-friendly site architecture
  • Tweaking your website architecture
  • Overhauling your website architecture
  • Wait, you’re not done yet!

What is Website Architecture?

Site architecture refers to the structure that organizes and delivers the content on your website. It includes the hierarchy of pages where users find content and the technical considerations that let search engine bots crawl your pages.

Good website information architecture makes sure users and search engine crawlers can move easily through your site. It helps users know “What do I do here?” and “Where do I go next?”

Site architecture optimized for SEO is attractive and efficient for bots to crawl. This helps them find and display your content in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Best Practices for SEO-Friendly Site Architecture

Google assigns every website a crawl budget. This determines how many pages a bot will crawl on your site. You want to make sure they crawl, understand, and index your most important pages – and as many of them as possible. Best practices in SEO architecture pave the way for this.

Google prefers simple URLs. Make sure your team keeps these things in mind whenever they create a new page or blog post:

  • Use lowercase words with alphanumeric characters.
  • Join words with hyphens.
  • Keep URLs short. (128 characters or less is a good rule of thumb.)
  • Make URL names appealing for humans. Use descriptive keywords, and include your main search query for the page, if you have one.
  • Use logical folders for categories and subcategories of content.
  • Avoid using session IDs in URLs.