information Architecture can make or break discoverability!
Having efficient Information Architecture (IA) is vital for any website exceeding 100 pages and gets increasingly important as you get to the enterprise site level of fortune 500 companies. Usually, the symptom of poor information architecture, is it takes FOREVER and a day to crawl the website. Pages need to linked together in manner that makes sense for the user (is UX friendly) and adheres to the logical hierarchy of the website.
All pages on any website, no matter the size, should be reachable by 4 or less clicks from the homepage. Meaning if a user or a bot crawler were to start to click through your website, it would take 4 or less links to get to every page on the site. This concept is called “crawl depth” and is an indicator of how well a website’s internal linking profile is. Here is an image that describes what poor internal linking looks like:
Poor internal linking and information architecture on a large website such as an e-commerce website can lead to pages not being indexed properly. The consequence of this is pages go unnoticed. By the way, a common trick to reducing a large amount of pages while increasing rank potential is combining content! That brings me to my next point – internal linking and page authority is something to keep front and center when thinking about site architecture.
Internal linking spreads page authority which is Google's way of assigning value to pages based on perceived importance. This perceived importance is based on visitors to that page, external links pointing to that page and prominence on the website. For example, typically the homepage is going to have the most authority on any given website. The pages that are linked to from the homepage will also receive some page equity from the homepage. By doing this, it makes these other pages more authoritative in Google's eyes.
One of the biggest problems I see large websites or even medium sized websites have is that often their information is silo'd. This means information isn't connected to each other via internal linking or a logical folder structure - this can lead to frustration and confusion. PRO TIP: it is always a good idea to link high value pages with deeper, less important pages on the site that the user might not see but contains content that can be ranked!
Keeping a straight forward, flat architecture that is easy to navigate is the best strategy to implement for optimal user experience.
URL structure
A website over 1000 pages has a propensity to get confusing for the user if pages are not organized properly. For a business like Home Depot organizing pages into category and product pages is critical, but what is sometimes overlooked is URL structure.
URL structure on a big e-commerce site can be confusing because of tracking tags on filter tags. There are two things you must remember when setting up URLs for a big website like an e-commerce site: URLs should follow the breadcrumb structure on the site and URLs should be very similar to the folder structure on the site.
Information architecture is the foundation of any website when it comes to SEO. When several websites under the same company come into play or converging multiple websites into one, IA becomes critical. Do not overlook this aspect of SEO and if you’re planning to build a big website information architecture planning should be on the top of the list
