SEO Website Architecture
A website’s internal hierarchy dictates the importance of content to search engines. Picture a typical company’s organisation chart. Now imagine that each box in the org chart is a page on your website. That’s the type of structure that search engines look for when they’re indexing websites.
Why?
Search engines want to make their users happy, so that those users will use them again in the future. One measure they take to accomplish this is placing an emphasis on directing search traffic to websites that are easy to understand and navigate. Think about it like this: If you’re looking at a site that has content related to planes, trains, and cars, with information on manufacturers, models, and specific trim levels for each type of vehicle, wouldn’t a hierarchy make sense? If none of the pages have a sensible relation to one another, how do you navigate from one page to the next effectively? A site hierarchy solves this challenge, and places each page of a website into a larger framework.
In addition to usability, search engines rely on an effective hierarchy to crawl websites thoroughly. If you don’t adhere to architecture best practices, your site may be unindexed or only partially indexed, costing you valuable impressions, traffic, and conversions.