The SEO approach to site architecture…

Structure your site design around search engines, not your homepage

Conventional wisdom dictates that when planning or mapping out a website, we should start with the homepage (or, god forbid - a splash page) and then create branches and leaves out from this until we have all the required information mapped out into discrete and well structured pages. The job of a web designer is then to make it as easy as possible for a user to reach those pages from the homepage. Throughout the brief history of web design as an industry we have seen many attempts to crack this particular nut, ranging from DHTML drop down navs to highly experimental flash apps that let you “deep” navigate a site. This conventional approach makes one almighty assumption - that everyone will start their user experience at the homepage and work their way through the site until they find what they want.

It doesn’t take a web guru to figure out that this assumption is not only wrong, but has been for some time. Users now navigate a website from search engine result pages. There is even evidence to suggest that when a user knows the address of a site and may even have it stored in their browser history, they will still use Google search to find it. Google can (potentially) do a far better job of allowing the user to navigate a site than any amount of trickery and slick design on the target site ever could. I say potentially, because there are a hundred and one things you can do to a site to prevent search engines from indexing it - either accidentally or by design - but this is another topic entirely.

Site architecture should now reflect this mode of navigation and the centre of any site map (and by this I mean early stage conceptual site map, not a page that has links to all the others in a site) should be the search engine results page. Seeing all the pages of a website as natural extensions of Google/Yahoo!/MSN Search rather than natural extensions of some limiting homepage design will lead to a far more successful website.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 7:36 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.