The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) Highlight

Designing site architecture Although site architecture — the creation of structure and flow in a website’s topical hierarchy — is typically the territory of information architects and is created without assistance from a company’s internal content team, its impact on search engine rankings, particularly in the long run, is substantial, thus making it wise to follow basic guidelines of search friendliness. The process itself should not be overly arduous, if you follow this simple protocol: List all of the requisite content pages (blog posts, articles, product detail pages, etc.). Create top-level navigation that can comfortably hold all of the unique types of detailed content on the site. Reverse the traditional top-down process by starting with the detailed content and working your way up to an organizational structure capable of holding each page. Once you understand the bottom, fill in the middle. Build out a structure for subnavigation to sensibly connect top-level pages with detailed content. In small sites, there may be no need for this level, whereas in larger sites, two or even three levels of subnavigation may be required. Include secondary pages such as copyright, contact information, and other nonessentials. Build a visual hierarchy that shows (to at least the last level of subnavigation) each page on the site. Figure 6-7 shows an example of a structured site architecture.