Beautiful Architecture Maximises SEO Link Juice

When Architecture Becomes a Matter of Function Over Form

When we talk about architecture, we immediately think of buildings, in aesthetic terms.

Beautiful architecture might look something like this:

Ugly architecture, meanwhile, might look something like this:

However, when we take architecture into the realm of the online, it takes on quite a new meaning: put simply, it describes how a website is laid out relative to its user experience and how a search engine will read it.

Whilst the user experience side of things certainly still falls within the remit of the beautiful, a lot of website architecture concerns function over form, i.e. how the website is arranged to enable it to rank in the search engine results pages.

Why your site needs good architecture

Site architecture forms the absolute foundation of any search engine strategy: to build links to a poorly structured site is like placing brick upon brick without any mortar. If you build your website in a way that navigates intuitively to an end user, the chances are that a search engine will have a good time reading it too.

Why does this matter?

Well, if you have an architecturally sound site, search engines can pass more link juice onto more pages, which, in turn, strengthens the overall authority of your domain.

The higher the domain authority, the more likely it is that your website will rank highly for the sort of searches performed by your potential customers. It’s this point that is absolutely pivotal to the reason why you need to put lots of ticks next to your site architecture even before you consider link building.

That superb link that you just secured from a decent site will transfer more link equity to a site which is well structured.

Site architecture checklist

Here’s a quick audit you can do of your existing website platform, to assess whether or not it is architecturally beautiful:

Can you navigate to all of your pages easily?
Are your key pages the most prominent?
Do you make use of a clear menu?
Are your pages interlinked in a relevant way? For example, if you sell curtains, have you included a link to the page where matching cushions are found?
Do you have a clearly defined sitemap?
Can the sitemap be found via the navigation?
Is your content easy to read and relevant?
Do your pages target a single theme? If you address multiple topics per page, it’s time to start splitting them out for both an easier user experience and ranking purposes.

Intent

At all times, it’s important to remain pure in your intent to give your website visitors what they search for. The navigation and any calls to action should never be misleading.
If you ask your user to click on a button to perform a given action, the link should take them straight there, without any doorway or intermediary pages. If you choose to ignore this, high bounce rates will signal a red flag to search engine robots and affect page rank.

Social Media

Architecture also extends to social media. It goes without saying that those whose social presence is robust are weathering the turbulent changes within the online world. With this in mind, it’s worth examining the following:

Can users connect to your social platforms easily via your website?
Are your images shareable and “pinnable”?

Outcomes

Following the principles above, you can expert a greater propensity of pages to be ranked for the right terms, resulting in a stronger overall domain authority. The result of this from a content marketing point of view is that your inbound links will have their link juice maximised, which is only a good thing for the website as a whole.

Want more information? Contact us here