Website Architecture and Internal Links

In this lesson we're going to be talking about website architecture and internal links.

Developing for SEO

If you who are developing websites from an SEO perspective you want to be thinking about a few things when it comes to architecture.

User Experience

The first thing you want to do is make sure users are able to find things quickly and easily. Having a great experience on your website should be a huge focus. That will really help not only your user experience, but also your SEO. A happy users is one who links to you, stays on the page a long time, and provide other positive signals that search engines interpret.

Search Engine Experience

The second important aspect is making sure search engines themselves are easily moving through your site. Search engines have some principles in mind whilst they crawl websites and we can do some smart things to make our sites architecturally friendly for those engines.

Principals for Great Site Architecture

Let's start with some of the principles of great site architecture for users and for SEO.

Don't Make People Think

First off, don't make people think. "Don't Make Me Think," by Steve Krug is the seminal book on the topic. Be empathetic to your users and give them a way to navigate the site that doesn't force them to feel lost. If you're on a shoe store's website and see something that says "brands," that's probably going to be where you navigate if your looking for Puma, Converse, or Nike.

That's very, very helpful. Likewise, we want to provide an experience when we get to one of those pages that gives it an easy navigation path back to browse by shoe style or by gender.

Fewer Clicks

Try to make people only take three to four clicks to get to any page. Check out this diagram.

If you have a home page, you can link to around 100 unique pages per page. From here you can link to 100 unique pages. Those are my top-level category pages. Now you have 100 links per page from 100 pages. That gets you to your second-level category. That's now 10,000 pages, as you can see from this model, using just 100 unique links per page, can reach a million potential detail pages in just 3 clicks. This means there's really no excuse for more than 4 clicks to any page on virtually any website.

Consistency

Be consistent. Consistent in the navigation format, the principles of your design, and how you show links. If all your links are blue and underlined, don't suddenly make some of your links orange and bolded. You want to have that consistent pattern. If all your links are always on the left-hand sidebar, keep those links there.

Leverage Industry Familiarity

Leverage standards and familiarity from around the web. If you're an e-commerce player, look at how Amazon and Zappos are doing business on the web. If they have a shopping cart in the top right-hand corner, a search bar, then there's top-level navigation, and product detail pages you may want to keep consistent with that format.

Unique URLs

Finally, always have one unique URL per unique piece of content. Don't have 10 different URLs that are accessible in 10 different ways that all provide the same piece of content. That's a navigational nightmare and a nightmare for SEO as search engines try to figure out which page they should show.

Internal Links

There are also some rules for internal links that are worth mentioning.

Make Links Relevant

Make links relevant and useful. When someone looks at a link they need to understand where it will take them and why it's being linked to from a page. This is important, especially if the link is inside of content rather than navigation.

Keyword Stuffing

Don't stuff keywords into the anchor text of your links. This is a no-no because search engines have seen people over optimize and spam anchor text to be deceptive. Don't overuse footer links, because it's a bad practice. We've actually seen Google make specific algorithms to shut that kind of behavior down.

Robust Sitemaps

It's okay to make navigation heavy sitemap pages to help search engines and people find pages. If you have different sections of your site with a sitemap page that's accessible via the footer you can make a million pages accessible through a sitemap.

This format is very familiar on the web. Users are used to it. Engines are used to it. It can really help with your site architecture.