When it comes to search engine optimisation, site architecture is certainly the unsung hero. The URL hierarchy and the navigation of the site are often the most crucial components that will determine whether the site will rank for high-volume, competitive phrases.
SEO expert Mason Soiza stated that while you may have top content, if the site is going to be a challenge for visitors to navigate or difficult for search engines to even crawl, you cannot really expect it to perform all that well where organic searches go.
Back then, there was a trend where flat site architecture is being used which feature URLs that lived off of the root of the site. The reason for this is to supposedly increase the link juice that gets funnelled through the home page. However, this type of architecture just ends up getting overstuffed with keywords.
A sound site architecture, however, banks on metrics concerning good usability. When visitors navigate a site, it will be easier for it to convert better. It is important to remember that as far as Google goes, pages have to be made primarily for users and not for search engines instead. This means that how the website is organised is something that the search engine cares about as it is crucial to your visitors and your customers.
When there is proper site architecture, you can get the benefit of sitelinks where the searches for your brand name will return a page list which Google believes are going to be most sought after or useful. There is improved crawling since Googlebot will send more time crawling the pages on your site, ending in a more thorough and deeper crawl.
The URLs and the user experience should reflect those sites that are currently dominating your industry or niche. Your customers visit lots of websites. Sites are considered similar since they meet the visitor expectations. Consider those websites that you have visited recently where you may have made a considerable purchase and you will find that the way it is organised may be quite similar.
Navigation should be something intuitive for your visitors. It also needs to reflect the customer journey.
The top pages need to be just a click or so away from the home page. Their target keywords should also be between just one to three words length-wise. Longer keyword phrases should be targeted too the deeper the visitors will navigate the site.
See to it too that the hierarchy of your site has been properly planned before you will build it. In addition, the URLs have to reflect the page depth. The URL representing the page must be longer the further you navigate into the site. Just bear in mind that longer keyword phrase should reflect the length of the URL. Also, the most valuable pages in your site need to be reachable in just a matter of three clicks or even less. This does not only improve the usability of your site but its crawl-ability as well.
When site architecture is properly implemented, it can become the cornerstone of your website. If properly planned, it also makes it easier for visitors to use the site while making it easy enough for Google to crawl. Ultimately it can determine how successful or not your SEO strategy is going to be. Learn more about effective SEO strategies by reading about Mason Soiza SEO online.
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