A Guide to Site Architecture for SEO

Chapter 2 of SEO Best Practice: Technical Optimisation

A site’s hierarchical structure determines how search engines will crawl and index its pages. This chapter outlines key considerations for structuring a site, including how to format URLs, create sitemaps and use tags.

By Econsultancy

23 minute read

How search engines crawl and index a website will depend on its architecture, that is, how it is structured through internal linking. This chapter describes how SEO practitioners should structure their sites to ensure they are crawled and served correctly. It covers:

Content: Categorising content is a key part of creating the site architecture. How can brands with many URLs, such as ecommerce companies, categorise their content to avoid any crawling problems?
Using tools: Google’s Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools provide site owners with information about site indexing, crawling issues and keyword analysis. How else can they use these tools to support their SEO strategy?
Sitemaps: Sitemaps inform search engines about crawlable pages on a website. How should they be structured, and what tags should they contain?