Learn how to develop proper link architecture for your website

Many people think design when they are planning to build their website. In fact they should think: functionality, user interface, goals, link architecture and how to implement it, keyword lists, target audience. The design is also very important but it should serve a purpose – I think about design as a coat that it’s meant to be wear in certain occasions.

This article is about the link architecture: how to plan it, how to incorporate it into the design process, how it can help your website.

First understand how search engines “look” at your website. The main page is the most important place where you should insert your most important content and links. This is where you should also target your most competitive keywords and give your best in terms of optimizing the page for search engine rankings and user interaction. So, if you consider a certain page to be very important try and place a link to it on the main page. If a user will have to click more than 3 times to access it then search engines will not consider that page to be that important.

And this is a logical thing: if something is so important to your website then why not place it on the main page? Why not make it easy to access it? Why not increase the chances of that content to be seen by the users? Why hiding it?

You have to organize your content into priority groups. By this I mean to think about the importance of each page on your website. Although for small websites this is not such a big problem, for the really big websites with thousands of pages this task becomes a “creativity exercise”. Assign numbers to each group, where number 1 is the top priority. Try to create 3 to 5 groups. The meaning of the numbers is that you’ll try to organize the content on the website to be accessible by clicking a certain number of links equal to the group number.

It would be great to be able to access all your content from your main page but in most of the cases this is unpractical, looks bad and will also confuse the user. An easy way to categorize your content is to think first to the biggest problem that you resolve. This is the main page. Now think about the smaller problems that are connected with this big one. This is group number one. Each of these small problems can also have different particular aspects. This is group number 2. And so on.

Here are some questions that can help you with this process. What is that you want your users to read first? What do you think they want to read? Why do you think a user accessed your website? What problems do you think you address with your content? Do you think that you resolve only big problems, or you can also categorize these too?

As you can see this entire step in website development has very much to do with the human factor and its success depends on how well you understand your target audience and how well you understand to solve their big problems.

Incorporating these groups into the design process can also be a difficult task and requires not only a creative mind from the designer but also your collaboration and a clear view of the project. Some links can be placed on sidebars but I think that the best way that you can introduce new content and depth to the website is to use the links naturally.

The idea is to develop content in a natural and friendly language. Place the link on text that transmits exactly what the user will get if he clicks the link. You can also think about widgets to display text links to different content generated dynamically. This last method can also help your pages to improve their page rank but also improve the user experience.

That is why e-commerce websites have widgets with best sell products or top sell products. For example Amazon through its affiliate programs uses millions of websites to push page rank to its lower pages by using widgets. It’s an excellent method that any website can apply it once it reaches a certain authority. Imagine a widget that displays random content from your website. And now imagine that widget on 100 websites and all their main pages pushing page rank to your pages.

The advantages of proper link architecture can be divided into two big ones:

-          Improve user experience and hence improve goal achievement. This is the proper way to lead the user to deeper content and to add depth to your website in a logical way. The challenge is to keep the number of clicks necessary to get a certain page as few as possible.

-          Improve indexing and rankings

Let me know if you have questions or if you have anything to add to all this. I’m interested in reading your comments on this topic, maybe ideas for developing link architecture for big websites.