Nowadays, the popularity of a website has become a significant factor that mostly determines how a business will strive in the market. The reputation of a site depends on things such as social media interactions, search engine results and customer reviews among other. However, search engine results still rank first as a factor that determines the popularity of a website.
As a result of this, Search Engine Optimization has become an essential tool that most businesses adapt to get the best ranking from search engine results and generate more traffic for their website. However, the efficiency of an SEO strategy still depends mainly on the website architecture.
What is Website Architecture?
Website architecture refers to the way that the components of a website are structured. In other words, it relates to the way a site is designed and laid out. Good website architecture is an integral part of a website, and it also serves as an important foundation for developing a highly user-friendly website.
Sadly, a lot of web developers overlook or underrate the importance of good website architecture and focus mainly on visuals and layout of websites. For instance, some website owners are often worried about high bounce rates or low user activities on their website despite generating more traffic for their sites. Several reasons might be the cause of this; however, one of the major reasons is having poor website architecture.
For every good website architecture, there are three important components; functional, technical and visual or aesthetic. These criteria must be considered while developing a website. Also, these criteria play major roles in making a site more productive.
Technical
When a website has good technical architecture, the flow of “link juice” is improved. The term “link juice” is the same as site authority which increases with the number of users that visit your website. The rate of flow of link juice in a website increases the authority that search engines give the site. This will, in turn, boost the website’s ranking in search engine results. This is directly related to SEO, which means that having a good site architecture will significantly boost your SEO ranking and generate more traffic to your website.
Furthermore, having a good technical architecture for your website helps you to plan ahead. It is evident that the world is ever-changing and technology and the internet will continue to evolve, but you can plan for these changes with good site architecture. An important question you should you ask yourself before developing your website is, how will the website perform in the nearest future, say 5 years? Having an excellent technical site architecture that allows your website to achieve its current goals at the same time as being easy to modify to meet future goals will surely provide you with a definite answer for this question.
When developing websites, a balance should be found between the technical aspect of a site and the design. Both aspects are essential, and one should not be compromised for another.
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Aesthetic
The aesthetic criterion is essential and should be specially considered while developing a website. Undoubtedly, the design of a site may determine the popularity of the website. For instance, your website might have the best articles or contents, but if your website design is archaic or looks like it was designed in the 90s, visitors will certainly leave your website and look somewhere else for similar contents. Also, this aspect deals with having a design that is visually appealing and has engaging calls-to-action buttons.
Your website should be organised in such a way that users do not skip the usual trend of search engines from page levels, i.e., homepage to category pages, to sub-category pages, to inner pages. Your calls-to-action buttons should not be confusing for visitors. A visitor should not have to be redirected or click a calls-to-action button repeatedly to get to a page they should have been with one click.
Having a good aesthetic architecture will significantly help to keep visitors enticed as the website becomes more appealing to visitors.
Functional
The functionality of a website reflects the ease with which visitors can navigate through a site. This criterion might well be the most critical criterion in a website architecture.
Having a good functional architecture will significantly help to keep visitors engaged as the website becomes more user-friendly and visitors can get what they need without stress. Also, it helps to reduce bounce rates and increase visitor time on site, visitor activities on your website and more pages per visit.
Each link or page on the website should have functions that are carefully organized in such a way that they provide visitors with the contents that they need in a straight-forward manner. An important factor you should consider when setting up your website architecture is your users or visitors. Having a good site architecture will help to ensure that visitors can use your website regardless of their age, be it a 5-year-old kid or a 70-year-old grandpa.
Also, the path which owners want visitors to follow on their website to get what they want should be considered; it may be purchasing a product, browsing through contents or signing up for newsletters.
Furthermore, good site architecture can also help to generate more traffic to your website as it makes it easier for web crawlers to navigate your website thereby increasing the distribution of link juice.
Conclusion
Despite being overlooked by most web developers, having good site architecture is an important thing to be considered while developing a website. Site architecture helps to create a website that is user-friendly and benefits the owner and search engines. Also, site architecture plays a huge role in optimising the use of a website such as getting more SEO ranking, reducing bounce rates and increasing user activities on a website. Just as it is vital to have an architectural plan for constructing a building, it is also important to have website architecture to develop the best site for your business. Good Luck!