Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, requires two fundamental elements to achieve results. The best known is web design, and the other is web architecture.
Broadly speaking, web architecture is the structure and form you want to give a website, prioritizing its sections to ensure proper indexing. This also affects the user experience, so good web architecture allows users to easily navigate the site and find the content they’re looking for.
Therefore, the web architecture is made up of pages, product categories, the blog, and its tags.
Thus, if you want to create a website, it’s key to consider what type of web architecture best suits your business. If you have a good plan from the start, you’ll be ready to rank on Google more easily and quickly.
In this article, you’ll find all the information you need about web architecture and its benefits for your business. You’ll also learn about the main types of web architecture, which will help you decide which one is best for your website.
Why is web architecture important?
As you already know, good web architecture significantly improves SEO ranking . Furthermore, web architecture promotes easy navigation and makes it easier for search engines to crawl the page.
Also, if you link to your website’s priority pages more frequently, you can improve their ranking, as you’ll be giving them greater relevance within your web architecture.
On the other hand, the user will also have an easier time browsing because they will stay on the site longer.
Therefore, if a website’s content is well structured, it will serve as a basis for organizing content, making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for and, thus, providing a positive user experience. All of this indirectly benefits the ranking of any project.
Benefits of having a defined web architecture
These are the main advantages of having a clearly defined web architecture:
- Google crawling is more effective: When Google crawls your website, it usually takes time. Therefore, if you give it a defined, hierarchical structure, you’ll make its tasks much easier. This will make it take much less time to understand your website and help it reach the URLs you want to rank faster.
- Better indexing: When Google crawls your page, it creates a kind of schema to make it easier to display elements. If it’s well-structured, it will appear in the SERPs when someone searches for your brand on Google.
- Better user experience: You don’t just have to think about Google, but also about your users. Your main objective must be to convert, regardless of the type of website, so that the user is comfortable browsing. You must also consider that people are impatient these days when browsing, and for the slightest reason, they leave the site and enter another. That’s why it’s important to make things easier for the user than for Google.
Types of web architecture
While there are several types of web architecture, the most frequently mentioned are:
Vertical web architecture
These are pages where there’s a large distance between the home page and the last possible page. Distances can be measured based on the number of clicks required to get from one URL to another.
The most sought-after aspect of a more efficient website is to have as few clicks as possible between the top and bottom levels. However, in vertical web architecture, this premise is contradicted from the outset.
In this case, several links are necessary to reach the requested information. The consequence of this distributive method is that the site’s indexing results will be very poor.
Flat web architecture
Google recommends that a website be no more than three levels deep. This is because it affects page crawling and the user experience.
Thus, flat or horizontal web architecture is one that allows users to access a site’s deep content in no more than one or two clicks. It’s the ideal distribution method, since the simpler the organizational system, the faster bots can read the patterns present on the page, which is beneficial for both search engine optimization and user experience.
