Domains, delivery and craft
What is Information architecture?
How content is organised, labelled and connected across a site. Good architecture means a visitor can predict where something lives before looking for it, and a crawler can reach every page within a few clicks of the home page.
Also called: IA · site structure
What good structure produces
- Every page reachable within three clicks of the home page
- URLs that describe their position without needing the navigation
- Labels using the words visitors use, not internal department names
- Related content linked from within the body, not only from menus
- No orphans — nothing in the sitemap that nothing links to
The test that exposes bad architecture
Ask someone unfamiliar where they would look for a specific thing, then see whether they find it. Card sorting formalises this; ten minutes with a colleague achieves most of it. Both beat arguing about menu labels in the abstract.
It decides what ranks
Internal links are how importance is signalled. A commercial page buried four levels deep with two inbound links reads as unimportant regardless of how good it is, which is why architecture is a ranking concern and not only a usability one.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.