Information Architecture with SEO in Mind

My largest successful SEO projects have come due to a variety of factors, but tend to come down to 3 core components of architecture:

It’s Scalable

It’s Crawlable

It’s Tiered

Scalable architecture is an obvious one; you need a system that can grow as large as you want/need it to.

Crawlable is nothing new to anyone in SEO; this simply means that the structure of our pages allowed for all of the most important content to quickly and easily be crawled and indexed by search engine robots. It actually sounds easier than it is… ensuring that the content is rendered (code wise) in the most ideal format for robots to parse takes more consideration than just laying out your div’s to properly render your designs.

To do this properly you need to make sure all of your code is in the right place, and more so, check how each crawler sees your page.

Take every opportunity to DRY out your code as much as possible, remember modern code is designed to cascade for a reason.

Information tiering… is a concept I have long-time preached to anyone who has ever talked with me, at length, about SEO. It means that your URL architecture should be built in a way so authority flows upwards through your directories.

For example, if I wanted to build authority around a core concept, I would focus my domain on that concept. If I then wanted to build relevance around specific locations for that concept, I would structure my URL’s so that all relevant content for that location fed upwards to a location specific directory.

So let’s say I had an SEO consulting firm with locations in several cities across the U.S., I would design an architecture that would allow for location-specific information to feed upwards through my directories.