For today’s blog post, I’m going to write about my favourite topic of all, site architecture for SEO. This write up is based on my recent presentation at SES London 2011, and rather than just posting the slide deck I thought it might be fun to write up a few of the slides with a commentary for each.
To help me recall all of the points I made, I’ll imagine myself stood at a podium with my speaker lanyard round my neck while I’m writing...
What is site architecture?
For me, great site architecture is all about improving how users and search engines find their way around your site. It’s about getting the best, most relevant content in front of users and reducing the number of times they have to click to find it. The same applies to search engines, by flattening your site architecture; you can make potential gains in indexation metrics such as the number of pages generating search engine traffic and the number of pages in a search engine index.
How many clicks from your homepage to your deepest content?
If you’ve never watched Rand’s Whiteboard Friday on Flat Site Architecture, you definitely should. The principle of reducing the number of clicks between your homepage and your deepest layer of content is as important today as it was back in March 2009:
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Flat Site Architecture from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
What does a not so good site architecture look like?
Let me explain with this handy diagram:
Imagine this sitemap describes a very simple site layout. To get all the way to the bottom (the very deepest layer of content) search engines and users are expected to embark on a 6 click descent. That’s a lot of clicks! That level of depth certainly isn’t ideal; you might expect pages that are deeply buried in the architecture to have fewer internal links and be less visible in search engine results, even for very long tail queries.
Creating a flatter site architecture
Most SEOs argue that pages buried very deeply in the architecture might not receive enough link juice to be visible in search engine rankings. Certainly it remains true that by promoting content “up” the architecture, you can improve its overall rank. This process is called “flattening”.
Let me explain with this handy diagram:
Here, we've increased the number of links on each page and reduced the number of clicks to the very deepest level of content, effectively flattening the site architecture.
There’s another important point that’s worth covering before we move forward. The concept of cross linking and silos.
What’s a Silo?
In a really simple sitemap, pages tend to link down to their "children". The homepage links to a category level page, and category pages link to product pages. Sometimes, a child can link back to a parent via the breadcrumb.
In this situation, you’ve got a vertical silo. There’s lots of link juice flowing down your site architecture, but not across.
Let me explain with this handy (but not quite so well drawn) diagram:
You can see in the diagram, we’ve got a well linked to internal page stuck in a silo. A useful way to solve this problem is to devise methods to cross link your content, focusing on what users might find handy in their journey around your site.
Here are a few examples of cross links in travel, retail and article based architectures:
.jpg)
Travel
- Similar destinations
- Nearby hotels / Landmarks
- Most popular / top countries
- Most popular / top cities
- Recently reviewed locations / hotels / resorts
Retail
- Popular products in this category
- Related (complimentary) products
- Users who viewed this item eventually bought
- Top rated / recently reviewed items
- Frequently searched items / categories
Articles / Blogs
- Similar posts
- Popular posts
- Recent comments
.jpg)
Sometimes improving your cross link strategy can be as simple as reviewing your site wide links. Here’s an example of a “top products” navigational element on a retail site on this “mother’s day gifts” category page. Our friends at PrezzyBox vary their links based on the page the user is on, creating more cross links and potentially adding more user value at the same time.
Navigation that reflects user behaviour
What are users looking for when they land on one of your pages? Sometimes, they tell you. When was the last time you looked at your internal site search data on a page specific level to find out?
In analytics, head to Content > Site Search and take a look at the “Top Searched Content” report. You’ll see the number of searches conducted on your site by URL and you can drill down to find out what those search terms were.
If users are looking for a very specific thing on one of your webpages, and they’re frequently having to search, maybe they can’t see it on the page. Try creating navigation to reflect internal site search behaviour.
Firebox.com link to popular searches from their homepage. These links could easily be swapped with links to the most relevant category page or product but either way, it's pretty easy to see what's popular on their site and I imagine it's a potential usability / CRO win too.
You want how many links on my homepage?
In my presentation I acknowledged that sometimes, it’s hard to fit in all the links we need on a page while maintaining the integrity of the site design. In my presentation I gave a special nod to two examples of navigation that I think are pretty cool for users and work just fine for search engines.
Cheapflights have CSS styled dhtml drop down style navigation on their homepage to show more links to destinations of interest to their visitors. If a user clicks “more” they get more options.
I’ve liked the vouchercodes.co.uk architecture for a long time. They code very nicely too. Check out this CSS styled carousel on their homepage. The links are marked up nicely, visible in text only mode (as the diagram shows), the CSS takes care of the layout and images and a little JavaScript takes care of the rest.
.jpg)
I covered a lot more examples in the presentation, but those were my favourite. Here's the slide deck for the rest:
Architecture is more than just internal links
Obviously there’s a lot more to site architecture than internal links – I’d be honoured to take requests for future posts, so if there’s something you’d like to see covered, let me know in the comments.
In the mean time, if you'd like the slide deck, head over to Scribd or download it from our downloads page.
This is a great post and very well-explained.
However, I think it should also include a discussion of the "mega-menu" problem that sometimes happens with dropdown menus. It is possible to make a site too flat, by placing hundreds or even thousands of links on every single page with a huge multi-layered dropdown menu.
In that case, the link juice going to any one page from the homepage gets so diluted that there will be problems with ranking and indexing.
Good site architecture should not be totally flat, it should be pyramid-shaped as in your diagram. If you have too many links in dropdown menus, it may be better to make the site less flat by having the menu only drill down within the current category.
I definitely agree with the "too many" sentiment - folks can spend a great deal of time getting their visible homepage links right and then forget that big menu is adding another 100 or so links! That's sub-optimal a lot of the time. Still, all things should be tested but I really dislike those big menus - usability FAIL.
Good point. My recommendation is to perhaps show the 10 most popular links in the menu, followed by a "More >>" link. This could either link to an index page, or use javascript / CSS to expand the menu. Still keep in mind that Google recommends max 100 links on a page although that is not a hard limit.
When I think about site architecture I like to compare it to classic retail strategies...freshest/hottest titles up front to draw customers in...hot deals displayed as endcaps to draw people down isles...content organized by department, title, etc. to facilitate easy of location...other featured content displayed promptly in department areas to facilitate discovery.
That description might be a bit hard to envision so let's consider an example we're all familiar with: iTunes. Whether you love iTunes or hate it, it's impossible to ignore its popularity and success. Let's look at how Apple has structured their wildly successful store...
As not every category is structured the same, let's consider Movies...
Search: iTunes offers a persistent search functionality to allow me to find a specific title very quickly. Great for user experience. If this was a crawlable website, this feature could also be used to generate 'landing pages' for any search query a site wanted to target (Richard's Firebox.com example above).
Navigation: Looking at the top-level navigation, I see iTunes offering every movie genre. Great for getting to where I want to browse quickly.
Movies Home Page / Movies Genre Page: The Movies home page and all Movie genre pages rely on the same templating system with varying widgetes. Clicking on "See All" or navigating via the top level navigation menu, we can see these pages offer a number of ways for the Marketing department to structure content for the end use including Featured Movies, New Movies, Discount Movies, Award Winners, Coming Soon, Free Movies, Movie Collections, Trailers, and more. Very handy for helping me find fresh new content and very handy for Apple to put what they want in front of me.
Title Pages: Clicking on a movie (in this case, Toy Story 3), I'm served a page that offers a breadcrumb structure that lets me easily navigate up from title to genre to category. I'm also served the following link widgets: Related Movies, More By These Actors, More By this Director, Viewers Also Bought, and a slew of other links in the footer.
Interestingly, in looking at the Toy Story 3 breadcrumbs, I see a link to a dedicated Pixar page. When I look at other animated titles from Walt Disney and 20th Century Fox, no such link exists. Hmmm....
Finally, I also find it interesting to note the content strategy iTunes uses. Toy Story 3 offers movie specific copy (Plot Summary, Credits, Release Date, Format, etc.), Rotten Tomatoes Reviews (content outsourcing), and Customer Reviews (unique user generated content). Very similar to what Richard called out regarding the 20Q toy (slide #18).
A great topic to post about, Richard. One that is easy to dismiss and only through critical thinking and deep analysis can revenue driving breakthroughs be made.
many times "no directories in URLs" and "flat site architecture" topics are mixed/misundestood so here is an attenpt to clarify a bit the flat site architecture issue. (Richard Baxter´s & Bastian Grimm´s articles and Rand Fishkin´s video referenced for obvious reasons)
Hi Ani,
That's a great article and thanks very much for the mention!
Richard
my pleasure, big part of the merit is yours
Great article Ani. Recommended for any modern e-commerce sites with a significant amount of products.
I love it and I am converting to this practice now for one of my clients. What is a good rule of thumb for how many clicks does it take to find a product?
Given a little thought (OK, maybe a lot of thought) you can start to visualize a site structure that is no more than 3 levels deep for many types of businesses. Some can be challenging and that's what makes for being more imaginative or doing a whole lot more work. E-commerce sites I think are the biggest challenge.
Nice post...it just calls for a second part about monitoring user experiences and journeys on your site (hint hint)! I'm sure everyone uses Google Analytics for that, but heat maps are amazingly useful too - Jenni
Hey Jenni - point duly noted! :-)
I think your most crucial point was the clarification of vertical links vs. horizontal links, an important distinction often muddled over in generic talk about good linking. Already thinking about better ways to link horizontally. Thanks!
Thanks for Clearing infromation about New Google Algo..
Back in the old days ;-) when everyone was on dialup the importance of getting traffic to the relevant page as quickly as possible was key - I used to say for every click the client has to make to get to where they need to be we potentially loose 50% of our traffic, which was over egging it but definitely instilled the need for getting traffic to where it needed to be as quickly and easily as possible.
As technology advanced, connection speed was less of an issue, and designers were able to do more and more, especially with home pages, and I think for some the success of Google blurred the issue, people saw all Google's traffic going to its home page, and they followed suit - but in Google's case (certainly until recently) that search page was the page that mattered.
Excellent advice, thanks for this. Just what I was looking for.
Thanks for Clearing infromation about New Google Algo..
Just watched Matt Cutts recent video on 100 links per page no longer being valid ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0&feature=relmfu )
Obvisouly 250 (ish) at home page level and 100 a sub home page level is still relivent, but does this clafication from Matt Cutts affect your thinking on site structure?
Glad you go over the silo's issue in detail. I see way too many sites that completely miss it. Love the examples and look forward to your next post.
Great article there :-)
Thanks for everyones patiece with all my comments here, the subject just happens to be one of my passions.
I think that Ani Lopez contributions fills the small gaps. I recently had to re-educate myself by reading "Information Architecture - for the world wide web". Information Architecture is for usability what Link/Site architecture is for SEO. What is NOT discussed in the book is if menusand links should be implemented in HTML, Flash, Ajax etc. But as we all know, thus can have a huge impact on link architecture and SEO. But you need to look at the big-picture, both usability as well as SEO. You will seldom find 100 categories with 100 subpages on a real life website.
But thats getting into the details Richard, your article is of great value in pointing out how important this topic is, and the more we write about it, the easier it will be to discuss with customers in the future. Thumbs up.
I agree with many others that the explanation of siloing is great and pictures are key. Too many articles, even if they are good (like this one from 2005 on siloing from Bruce Clay) have no actual illustrations of site architecture. Not including illustrations is missing a linkbait opportunity IMO!
Excellent Video - Very Helpful! Thanks so much! (I wish the lighting was a bit better though.)
As an San Francisco Based SEO Consultant, I definitely like to keep up on the current tips! Thanks for the insight Richard! - https://ynottony.com/ynot/google-search-engine/seo-consultant/
Hello Richard,
I am really impressed with the article you have posted. You certainly are one of the most well honed SEOs I have come across... I am still a newbie... nothing compared toguys yet.
Awesome man... awesome!!!
Nice explanation. Is it nice to place all commercial landing pages ( product pages) just below the root domain though their number would be around 50k ?
Many eCommerce sites does this so that the root domain link juice flow directly to the product pages. What's your say on this ?
Hi Richard, good post again.
I'm working my way through a 100.000 page ecommerce site at the moment with a lot of crawl errors and non-indexed pages. I think working on the site hierarchy will make a big difference here. thank you for sharing.
Great Post Richard for your educational help.I found your post helping alot of individuals who would benifit them selves from the information.I also noted that apart from a good site structure , submitting to a google maps for business places also pulls your site to the top if you carefuly submit your website on google places and verify it.I had a project for search cheap flights a UK based travel agency and i helped them with the structure and submission of their website and now the site itself is doing a great job.
[link removed]
Great article and it gives good inspiration. I have tried lived up to the low hierarchy structure by using a Metro Map as starting point for 50 links. The Metro Map present all the issues you need to consider when starting a business.
See https://www.dynamicbusinessplan.com/business-plan-metro/
Great Map ! Nice way to give access to all internal pages. Maybe you should emphasize a bit the categories, I mean graphically ;)
@Richard, can you clear a doubt regarding one of your sentences:
"Cheapflights have CSS styled dhtml drop down style navigation on their homepage to show more links to destinations of interest to their visitors. If a user clicks “more” they get more options."
Isn't this considered white hat cloacking and therefore can be risky to implement?
Great post, very detailed and easy to understand explanation! Thank you so much, Richard!
In my research of Site Architecture SEO, I came across your post and another article from Joseph Piracci called Proper Site Architecture for SEO. I’m not sure if I misunderstood his or your points but Joseph suggested to never link between silos. You, on the other hand, suggested cross linking. And since both of the articles have been written a while ago, I would like to ask you your current opinion on the matter, to cross link between silos or not?
Cheers,
Trang Lam
thanks for the post. at smaller pages a deep level of 3 is quite easy to realise. at bigger pages it is a challenge but from seo perspective absolutely neccessary.
Well done, Richard.
A great example of well-structured site is wikipedia. They have millions of pages indexed and wiki pages normally ranked highly in Google for factual search queries. The reason being is how well they provide related links at the end of each article which naturally flows the link juice and solidify the internal linking within a site. Hope that helps.
Hi Richard, really enjoyed reading this. I think the examples of how you can improve your internal linking were really good as it can be tricky sometimes to find 'natural' ways of doing this.
Thanks for the Interesting Post that solve so many miss conception. Obviously the misconception with me was not that site architecture is all about internal linking but Thank you for clearing the concept of silo!
And I would really want you to cover (bit different topic from this but…) Link buying that works. as few days back Kate Morris took an interview with some known link builders across the globe and one of them talk about link buying as a part of their link building strategy…
Good follow up post to your presentation at SES which I attended. Yours was one of the better presentations in what was a slightly disappointing day for me. It's nice to get confirmation of what we are striving to achieve on the sites which I'm involved in.
I still find many sites failing to truly establish good link architecture, rather they just cluster links to deep pages in the heirency.
So are breadcrumbs good or bad? :)
Breadcrumbs are good. They're a good UI feature as well as providing links "up" the site structure.
Therefore if you have a page:
Home > Category > Products and the Products page is well linked to, it will send some link juice to the Category and Home pages via the Breadcrumb link.
and if you have a liniar structure as described - what's the point in using breadcrumbs ?
If your site is truly "flat" - and only has one-click-away pages, then breadcrumbs won't do any good - they'll just repeat the standard navigation.
If you have a categorically structured site, though, breadcrumbs help people find their way back home, or to related products rather easily.
They are the links going back up the silo as demonstrated above.
From a SEO perspective I would recommend breadcrumbs for sites 3 clicks or deeper. In general you should avoid having two identical links on the same page, and if your site is only two clicks deep, chances are you are just duplicating links already in the main menu.
Hi,
I am "stuck" with architecture of a website which allows me to work almost solely with the website footer to promote my keywords with links to their content due to design limitations. Will it be better to change their location to a page in the article page which is located in the upper menu? Would any place will be better then the footer?
Amir Barel
Dont treat the symptoms, go for the cure. Get access to everything or tell them not to waste their time
That level of restriction is likely to be a waste of time and money for everyone involved. The more restrictions in what you can optimise the (far) less likely you are to succeed
In your situation, I would have said: no thanks, good luck
Thank you for your comment, I have set down with the client and explained it to him and get a green light for a more comprehensive change in the site architecture :)
Hi Amir
Completely agree with Stephen there. That's optimizing with one hand tied behind your back. Your best advice to the client as their SEO would be to tell them to start again. Happy to have a look though if you provide the URL.
Robb
Thanks here it is www.fugata.co.il, sorry for the late response.
If they hired you to optimize the site, shouldn't you be the one telling them what to do with it - and not the other way around?
If the architecture of a site needs attention, the fix would hardly be adding some footer links.
Hi Barel
Best thing is if your keyword targeted pages are part of the ordinary menu-structure. But it still makes sense to promote certain keywords in a site-wide navigation. But make it good for usability. In a footer element add links to the most viewed pages from Google Analytics, customer service, contact us etc. along with links to pages you like to promote (Popular products). And don't take it too far with keyword/linkstuffing.
Thanks for clearing this up Richard. Everyone talks about "clean" and "neat" site architecture, but seldom delves any deeper. This article helped clarify some questions I had in mind.
Richard,
Thanks for the very interesting article.
Similar to Jean's question above, how would you structure a site (like ours: www.cognibeat.com) that has a seperate blog, scientific papers, company details and so on? Surely they should all be interconnected?
Is this a request for a post titled: "planning your site architecture"?
Ah... that will surely be a great one... so, if it wasn't, consider it requested by me :)
Absolutely!
Thank you for the post.
Good ideas for cross linking / deep linking with related topics, popular products etc. There will always be a way for it on all kind of webpages.
Really valued the post on site architecture...you actually managed to make it quite simple to understand. Would site architecture for large websites (especially news websites like cnn.com and bbc.co.uk) differ?
Hey there
I think many of the principles are are the same with news sites - you see features like most commented and related stories. I think a lot of news sites have a lot to learn architecture wise from other commercial entities though - especially when it comes to global nav, internal content links and homepage links.
good post richard. i feel i need to review my sites if i have the right site architecture. i look forward to an update whetver is best to use keyword targeted text on the internal links or not.
Example, which is better for a contact page? (example: www.seoseoseoseoseo.com/contact/)
Thanks!
Hi Alfred
Just my opinion. But that would depend on the actual URL and structure. Obviously keywords in the URL are a good thing (in general) but I wouldn't want to double up if the TLD also includes those keywords. So:
For www.seosandiego.com - I would use www.seosandiego.com/contact-us or www.seosandiego.com/contact-an-online-marketer or something similar.
However if the TLD doesn't contain your phrase I would go with:
www.sdmarketers.com/contact-an-seo
Again this would depend on whether the TLD includes keywords, geo mentions etc. I just wouldn't go too far towards stuffing.
Robb
Example, which is better for a contact page? (example: www.seoseoseoseoseo.com/contact/)
- the last one will be the best option but only if you are from San Diego :))
On larger sites, a silo with correspond to a full module of the site. I use this concept when created site architecture of large sites : a module must be able to perform well in SEO by himself.
Once this is done, start thinking about cross linkling with other modules by looking for common parameters in the module pages.
Anchor are important, cross linking is perfect to have various internal anchor text for a given page.
The less work a visitor has to do the better. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to navigate around your site and find what they need. If they have to work for it, chances are they’ll just leave and find a site with a more friendly navigation.
Hi,
Great Article. And thanks a lot for the pictures.
It makes a lot more easy for me to understand
when I see a diagram of the issues.
Last time I was presented to Silo, I didn't
understand a single word , but this time it
made much more sense.
Great blog
Cheers
Tina
tinalindgren.com
How would you improve the structure of something the size of the Yahoo Directory?
Jean Madden
you did it again, richard!
Thanks for sharing!
Really great and useful post, thank you.
However, I have some doubts about Tag Cloud efficiency... In my opinion, this kind of information access is not very used by visitors or even by robots, but I have no statistics to justify this idea (I'm searching for it currently, since I do not own website big enough to collect such data). If you have any, please let me know !
For me it looks so messy that i'm not attracted by this way of search for information. I am a biggest beliver in what Vouchercodes.co.uk does for example :)
Going to check all your slides from SES now !
Thanks again for the article.
I'm not sure if I understand these silos. Highly linked to interior pages should be naturally supplying link juice back to the core of the site (other silos) via the site's navigation. This post seems to suggest that having a side widget that links to new pages/popular products/tags(yuck)/popular searched phases (if these pages are dynamic then yuck again) will somehow provide improved site architecture.
I would be very careful about adding these modules. For example a tags module will just add a bunch of more links to each page, the page's PR gets divided up more and then a portion of each page's link juice starts flowing into tag pages instead of back to the homepage and category pages where you want it to flow. I do see the value of adding a popular products or popular categories module, but are you saying that a tags or popular searches module are good? Because I would want to make sure those links go to pages that A) provide value and have good conversion and B) are pages you want to rank for.
Maybe a bit more advice on good vs bad modules?
Hi Brandon. You take fior granted that the links in a tag-cloud linsk to tag-pages. They might as well link directly to single keyword targeted pages that you have. But whenever you choose to add or remove links from a page or template, you should consider how they influence the overall link structure. In some cases it will be a benefit, in others not. But tag-clouds should definately be a part of the toolbox.
Thanks for clearing my confusions about arcitecture.before this i was thought that "clean" and "neat" site architecture, but now it clear my mind & it helped clarify some questions I had in mind..
great post...!!!!
What would you suggest for blogs?
Nice post! Would adding a bottom navigation to every page with your most popular pages be a good way to avoid "silos?"
The popular pages/posts nav would be a start - but don't forget about the less popular ones, too.
Note the examples listed under "What is a silo" - take the idea behind those examples and create useful link sections on your pages - these are usually a combo of related, popular, and important.
Given a little thought (OK, maybe a lot of thought) you can start to visualize a site structure that is no more than 3 levels deep for many types of businesses. Some can be challenging and that's what makes for being more imaginative or doing a whole lot more work. E-commerce sites I think are the biggest challenge.
Good Job :) Keep Blogging
can you give me explain that with my web site ?
Hi there! If you'd like some help, I recommend visiting our Q&A forum. :)
Awesome.
I am embarking on building 3 ecomm sites at the moment and this post is super helpful for that. Any suggestions on what area to interlink across for relevancy? Wait till the product page level, or at the categories?
Great article!
Devin
[link removed by editor]
Your math is wrong, 100^4 = 100.000.000 :)
Your reading was wrong. He said 10^3 = 1.000.000.
Haha! To be fair, we're all correct - 4 levels at 100 links p/p = 100,000,000,000 pages. :-)
to be even more correct and given the html site map example in the video, you should start counting the counting with the site map page, not with the home page. You're not linking from the home page to 100 site map pages, but to a single one
Level 0 would be 1 page
Level 1 would be 100 pages
Level 2 would be 10.000 pages
Level 3 would be 1.000.000 pages
Site total: 1.010.101 pages
If you want in the 100 million pages area, that would require 4 clicks from the homepage :-)