Web architecture: learn the importance of structuring it well and its effects on SEO

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When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) , both architecture and web design are essential elements in which we have very little room for error if we want to see results.

In turn, web architecture is a practice that is constantly changing due to the emergence of new trends and standards proposed by the most famous search engines, led, of course, by Google and its algorithms .

Keep reading until the end and learn about the importance of car owner database properly structuring a web architecture, its effects on SEO and how good work will improve the digital presence of your brand .

So what is web architecture?
Web architecture is the planning and design of the technical, functional, and visual components of a website, before it is designed, developed, and implemented. Designers and developers use it as a means to execute their work.

This is therefore the conceptual structure of the World Wide Web —WWW—. The WWW or Internet is a constantly changing medium that allows communication between different users and technical interaction (interoperability) between different systems and subsystems.

The basis for this is the different components and data formats, which are usually organized in levels and build on each other.

This Internet infrastructure is also made possible by the three core components of data transmission protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTPS ), representation formats ( HTML , CSS , XML ) and addressing standards (URI, URL ).

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Why is web architecture important for SEO?
A good website information architecture ensures that users and search engine crawlers can easily move around our portal .

Additionally, in terms of User Experience , it helps users know: “What am I doing here?” and “Where am I going now?”

An SEO-optimized web architecture is attractive and efficient for bots to crawl . This contributes to finding and displaying our content in the SERPs.

So how do web architecture and SEO come together, and more so, how does it present itself as a key element of search engine positioning strategy ?

For three reasons:

Guided search engine spiders
An optimized web architecture helps search engine spiders find and index all the pages on your website .

If we have pages that are several clicks away from the home page—or that are not linked from any other page—Googlebot will have a hard time indexing them.

Now, if the web architecture is interconnected, spiders crawling the websites can follow internal links to 100% of the home pages.

More page authority
Web architecture sends link authority around the website. When we have internal linking to high-priority pages, more link authority—PageRank—will flow to those pages, which can help us improve ranking on Google .

Correctly linking the most important pages on our website will give Google the information it needs to understand which pages have the most weight and, therefore, show them before the rest.

Users will find what they need, and more!
A proper web architecture makes it easier for visitors to find what they need on our site.

A clear example is if we place other related products next to a product, content that can feed the user's search or complement the original, we will be able to retain the person more, get them to inspect more areas of our website and, in the best case, complete the purchase.

This will provide SEO with:

More time spent on the website .
More clicks.
High page consumption.
Among other factors.
For Google, these are signals that our website is relevant to the user, which will improve our positioning in the SERPs .

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What factors should be considered when designing a successful web architecture?
Given its importance, we cannot underestimate the role that web architecture can play in helping to attract and engage new customers .

Let's explain 3 of the critical factors we need to get right in order to get real business results from our online presence:

1. Site loading speed or performance
Within a web architecture, its performance refers to how quickly it loads in a visitor's browser, whether from their computer or mobile device.

According to Hubspot, just a 1-second delay can reduce user satisfaction by 16% . So if we want to appear at the top of search engines, it is essential to have a good loading speed on our website.

What can we do to optimize web performance?
We need to make sure that images are properly optimized . Files should be kept to 1500 pixels on the longest edge, with image file sizes no larger than 200kb.

In this case, Shopify recommends that they average around 100kb.

2. Responsive design
A responsive website design adjusts the site layout so that the user interface looks good on any screen, from smartphones and tablets to desktop computer screens.

In large markets such as the United States and Latin America, mobile Internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic for the first time in 2016. Therefore, Google - in 2017 - incorporated mobile responsiveness among the main criteria for how well a website ranks in search results.

Currently, according to Statista , mobile searches—excluding tablets—generate 54.8% of global traffic, which represents an increase of 4.8% compared to 2017.

3. SSL Security
An SSL security certificate allows secure connections from a web server to the visitor's web browser. When installed on our website, our URL will start like this: https://. If it starts with “http”, it means that it is not a secure site.

Starting in 2018, Google began penalizing websites that do not have this cybersecurity method, so without this secure protocol we could run the risk of losing search ranking and being blocked or marked as “not secure.”

4 best practices for SEO-friendly web architecture
Google assigns each website a crawl budget, this determines how many pages a bot will crawl on the site.

We need to make sure that our most important pages are crawled, understood, and indexed, and as many of them as possible.

The following 4 best practices pave the way to optimize this automatic management and create a successful web architecture:

1. Use an SEO-friendly URL structure
Google prefers simple , keyword- rich URLs .

Make sure your team keeps the following points in mind every time they create a new page or blog post:

use lowercase words with alphanumeric characters;
join words with hyphens;
Keep URLs short with a maximum of 128 characters;
make URLs with attractive names using descriptive keywords;
2. Use a sitemap
Bots like it when we make it easy for them to find content, and one way to do this is to use a sitemap .

In fact, Google gives us a nudge and recommends two types for optimal crawling: XML sitemaps and RSS/Atom feeds . These bots target all the pages we want to crawl, plus any recent updates we've made to the pages.

3. Consider how pages flow into each other
Pay attention to the anchor text – these are the words in the content that are linked to, sending an important signal to bots and humans about the content on the other end of the link.

Additionally, where pages are linked from can indicate their importance. Search engines consider pages linked throughout the site, for example in the navigation, to be the most important because they are just a click away from any page on the site.

Typically, each page should be accessible in less than 5 clicks.

4. Ensure a safe and easy-to-use User Experience
Search engines care that the sites they display provide a good User Experience ( UX ) . As a result, they reward those who pay attention to:

Speed: Reduce page load times whenever possible.
Mobile-Friendly – ​​Make sure your website displays smoothly and responsively on any screen.
Security: Look for the site to use the SSL protocol, which provides “https” security.
Clear navigation: Avoid pages with too many links.
A solid web architecture strategy coupled with good design allows us to develop a website that makes a great first impression; it’s that “Wow!” we hope potential customers feel when they see our brand’s main presentation online.

However, this can only happen when we meet the trending standards and leverage the best practices we've developed in this content to attract, engage, and convert the right leads.

This is a broad topic, so we invite you to learn more about the requirements that must be taken into account for the quote of a website and the essential elements for the creation of a page.

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