Site Architecture, sometimes called Website Information Architecture, is part of the structure of links in a website.

The links on a Web page create a parent/child relationship between the two pages where the source page is the parent and the destination page is the child.

Among the benefits of having good site architecture are increased crawlability (more indexed pages), better usability, and better search engine rankings.

Typically, site architecture analysis starts from the homepage and a tree model is built to show the relationship between the homepage and the interior pages. With this model we can visualize click paths and see how related content is grouped together within the site.

What Does Good Site Structure Look Like?

The main thing about a good site structure is limiting the number of clicks that are needed from the homepage to any of your conversion opportunities like “add to cart” or “signup for newsletter”.

A flat site architecture is preferred over a deep site. A flat site architecture refers to a site that has a lot of 1st level child pages and fewer 4th, 5th, 6th and higher level child pages. All of the pages on a site are represented as close to the homepage in the architecture as they can.

In addition to having a flat site, it is always good to have 2 separate ways to navigate through the site. This is usually handled through an HTML sitemap. Sitemaps give search engine bots a secondary place to look for pages that it may not have been able to index through the primary navigation.

The Benefits:

Better Crawlability results in more of your pages getting indexed by Google. Reducing the number of child pages and including an html sitemap on your site increases the chance of Google indexing your deeper pages.

Better Usability is the least concrete of the benefits, because usability can be a difficult thing to define. The idea that there are links between related pages and there are the fewest possible clicks between homepage and conversion pages are good for usability.

Better Search Engine rankings are a byproduct of good site architecture because related content is linked and grouped together.

Search engines use links in the formula to determine search engine rankings and when related pages are linked to each other it can boost both pages for relevant terms that they share.

Search engines also use links to pass value from page to page, so your highest traffic pages can be used to increase the rankings on other pages by linking directly to them.

Have you had to redesign your site architecture?  What did you do?  Did you see an improvement?  Leave a comment below!

Tags: Google, indexed, site architecture, usability

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Design, E-Commerce Definitions, Navigation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.