Site Architecture in SEO

Your site architecture is the structure of your website; the way you organize your information. When building site architecture, the main focus is on your user, of course. However, website architecture is a critical component of SEO. To improve your SEO ranking, your site architecture needs to focus PageRank on the most important pages or the pages that generate the best profit margins.

Good website architecture helps search engines categorize your content. It also allows you to funnel link equity through your site. Inbound and outbound links on each page to support the hierarchical structure of a website promoting the most relevant pages to users. It also can strategically increase the value of most commercial pages.

Through proper site architecture you distribute the link authority throughout the website, starting from your home page. Your home page is most likely the most popular page on your website. Its link value (PageRank) is split between main navigation links and other links leading from the home page.

As you move deeper into your website, there is less and less link authority to go around. Think of it like a champagne pyramid - you pour one bottle of champagne into the top glass (your home page). Not all of the liquid will be distributed to the bottom layer of your glasses. To make sure one of the glasses important to you at the bottom of the pyramid gets filled, you could re-direct natural flow to go to that glass directly.

Similarly, if you want to promote a page deep within your website, it could be a good idea to link it from your category page (main navigation link page) or even from your home page. Of course, another great way is to get links to that page from other websites directly - the websites that would pass link authority (or link juice) to your page.

Improving PageRank

If you need to create a prominent page, make sure it is located close to your main homepage. For example, a page located at www.yoursite.com/prominent-page will rank higher than www.yourseite.com/archive/mycategory/prominent-posts/prominent-page. It is also likely that your home page will have the highest PageRank. Pages deeper in the website tend to have lower PageRank. Keep in mind, that the higher the PageRank, the more likely your page gets indexed by search engine crawlers.

One more factor in how many pages a search engine will index on your site is host load. If 50 people came to your website at the same time, will your website host send them pages simultaneously or one by one? If your website host allows only a few simultaneous connections or not at all, the number of pages a search engine will be able to crawl is even smaller than average.

Here is an example of strategic PageRank distribution. If you have 10 best selling products, put them on your home page. Each page containing one of those products would have a link to accessories or other related products, and so on. If your website is not large (less than 50 pages), it is advisable to implement flat site architecture where all pages are 3 clicks or less from your home page.

Logically structured website will pass the page value (or PageRank) to categories which in tern send link juice to category pages. Cross-linking pages helps boost value as well. That is why it is recommended to have "Similar posts" section on your blog post page.

Pages on your website are competing against a large number of other pages with same or higher PageRank. The page that has a lot of inbound links will get discovered quickly by search engines and will be crawled more often.

Avoiding Duplicate Content with Site Architecture

It is quite common knowledge now, that search engines (Google in particular) does not like dupliate content. No surprise here. If several duplicate pages are discovered, only one page is kept. And in the end of the day, it will look like your website has less content. Moreover, there is a limited number of pages that a search engine robot will fetch. If you have duplicate content that was discarded, you missed out on the opportunity to have your good pages crawled. If your website host load is low too, you are even worse off.

First, check if you are using Session IDs. If you do, stop using them. There are many reasons why you should not use Session IDs. The main reason in the scope of this discussion is that a search engine might look at your page with different Session IDs as duplicate pages.

What if you look at the pages and you are absolutely sure that all of them are different? Keep in mind, that search engines can see only text. If several of your pages have very little text and a Flash movie, for example, those pages will look the same to search engine robots. That's why you need to be very careful how you hadle Flash movies. Pages with very little text also could be qualified by search robots as pages with poor quality content.

It is also possible that you knowingly have duplicate content. For example, you sell a product and accessories to it. If your customer selects a product from your navigation, the next link would be to the accessories to this product. What if you want to allow users to select accessories first and then fit them to the product they already have? Search engines will follow your link structure and discover the same page which will be considered "duplicate". It is easy to use NoFollow for one path and block it from search engines.

Once again, make sure your most important category is the first parameter in the URL, then go down your content hierarchy to categorize content and place it in appropriate level. Site architecture like this will help search engines discover your content better. Well thought through site architecture will allow to strategically dissipate PageRank to most important pages.

The best option is to have a good site architecture. You can merge duplicate URLs together by using 301 Redirects or utilize "rel=canonical" on duplicate pages to tell search engines which URL is the main one. But fixing the problem in website architecture is a much better option. Each search engine is implemented differently and will handle your duplicate content differently. Good site architecture will give you more control over your content.

Good architecture will also improve user experience and will result in better revenue per visitor. If your website is complex, it is advisable to provide better guidance to search engines when they come to index your content. Alternatively, you can create a simpler navigation for your content. Have a website map with simpler, straightforward hierarchy.

How Good is Your Website Architecture?

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