Site Architecture
February 23rd, 2010 by Dan
Site architecture describes the way in which a website is designed. Site architecture might be compared to folder structure on your work or home PC, where you would have C: »User »User Name »Photos » XMAS 210 »Photo Name.jpg. In website architecture design this would almost directly translate to Home » Category » Sub Category » Sub Category 2 » Filter » Product Name.
Having a good structure to your website has many benefits for both users and SEO.
Diagram
Typical Site Architecture. The left hand column shows the last cached date of the pages, and the right column the level of the given pages.
User Benefit
The benefit to users is that they have a clear navigation path. Web users are becoming more and more web-savvy, and tend to use the address bar as a bread crumb style navigation. So if a user is deep into your site but knows they want to be in the next level up they may just edit the address bar removing a single layer of hierarchy in the URL.
SEO Benefit
The SEO benefit work in much the same way that the user gets benefit. There is a clear path of navigation for the search spiders to follow and distribute the authority. You will normally see that the in-linking patterns of the pages reduce the further into the site you get, i.e. the homepage will have the greatest number of links pointing at it, then categories and so on until the product level.
This is reflected in the Page Rank distribution as shown above.
Overview
Site architecture is one of the most important factors to consider when building a new site, particularly if it is going to be an e-commerce system or large-scale content management system, and it is key to get it right from the very start, as it can be almost impossible to change in the future.
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