Dallas SEO Expert Explains Website Architecture

How important is a website’s architecture, in terms of search engine friendliness? Very, according to some experts. One SEO case study compares designing an e-commerce website to drawing a road map of a metropolitan region:

“The biggest roads need to radiate from and connect to the most valuable pages on the site, except that the roads carry link popularity and human visitors, rather than cars,” a Dallas SEO expert said of the study. “In the same way that humans can look at a map and understand which cities are more or less important, the search engines can digest a crawlable site’s architecture to identify which pages are more or less important.”

Makes sense, right? Especially in light of recent Google algorithm changes. As for the major city comparison, let’s use can picture a major metro area like Dallas. Perhaps ironically, the city sits in the center of a web-like structure, with large roads carrying traffic that flows to and around it.

Now, picture that the city of Dallas is an e-commerce website. The home page sits at the center of the site’s map. Links originating from that home page lead to less popular pages, which are located deeper within the site. Think of these pages as Dallas’ surrounding cities. For less important surrounding cities (web pages), there will be fewer roads (links) leading to them.

Need a more specific geographical example? Richardson, a suburb of Dallas, is accessible to Dallas and other suburbs via Highway 75. But Parker, Texas sits near Farm to Market Road 2514, a divided highway that can handle only a fraction of the traffic that Highway 75 can. Now, picture a website again. The suburb of Richardson is a category page, the minor suburbs accessed via Highway 75 are subcategory, and outlying communities like Parker are product pages. The easiest access to Dallas comes from the major suburb, Richardson – your category page.

According to this SEO case study, your site’s architecture should serve three purposes: to provide a crawl path for spiders, pass link popularity via other links, and pass relevance via anchor text. In other words, website architecture is extremely important. A good Texas SEO service provider will create infrastructure for your site that resembles an intricate roadmap – one that always leads to the major city.