Basic SEO Information Architecture

A good, quality, basic information architecture will help your SEO rankings and your users no end.

A good IA helps to give structure to your site, to your content and a clear internal linking path through which to navigate. If done well, it also enable users to find what they want more easily and get straight to the quality content you’ve written.

#SEOGuides #SEOStrategy #InformationArchitecture

Purpose:

• A good IA helps to organise your content into logical, consistent structures.
• A good IA helps users to navigate themselves easily to the next step of their user journey.
• As humans like order, ordered content allows users to swiftly identify where they would like to go.
• Information architecture allows all relevant content to hang together and starts to prioritise the pages which  should get more traffic.

Guidelines:

1. Assuming you have done your keyword research, allocating keywords to topics, and prioritising them, then creating a comprehensive IA is a relatively straight-forward exercise.
2. Start from the top. The highest priority keywords & topics will form the most important pages.
3. Then, the next most important keywords & topics will form the secondary pages.
4. And finally, most of the other keywords and topics form supporting pages.
5. By taking this top-down approach the most important pages will naturally accrue the most internal links and external links, and sub-pages will all support upwards and cross-links across the topic, establishing relevance and expertise.
6. If aligning URL structure to topics, then use topics to create sub-directories, or sub-folders.
7. The IA if structured as above will also naturally form nav menu structures, sidebar menu structures and footer menus,
8. Tweaks can then be made to these menus to surface key content which is important, but may lie somewhere down the structure.
9. The IA should also be used to inform internal links for in-body links, priority pages should get the most internal links, followed by secondary pages and supporting pages. This also helps to order your workflow.
10. Finally, a decent IA and Keyword Research will also strengthen internal linking because link labelling will be more consistent, and if keywords have been grouped appropriately, give more relevant variations in terms used for link labelling and general text usage,
11. In short, think of a good Information Architecture as a strong skeleton for your site, everything hangs together and works in harmony (mainly).

Return to Top