Study Notes
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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Importance of site architecture
Follow a logical structure
Similar to the foundations and structure of a house, it is extremely important that a website is structured in a logical and consistent way that search engines will find easy to crawl and understand. A clear and easy-to-follow site structure leads to a great user experience, and great user experience usually leads to a website that ranks well. It also allows for easier crawling and indexing of the content, and better site links.
Group related content together
Some other concepts to grasp when it comes to site architecture are that:
- Subfolders should be used to group related content together.
- Within the URLs themselves it is important to use relevant keywords at the beginning; the keywords should be ordered from left to right in order of importance, as this is how search engines crawl URLs.
Ultimately, the goal of your site and the architecture within it, is to drive users through to conversion in as few clicks as possible.
Case study: BMW
So for example, let’s say a user visits BMW.com and they want to book a test drive for a BMW X5.
The user will typically land on the homepage or even better on the SUV’s page itself.
From that page, they should ideally find a subcategory page that will bring them to a form to book a test drive at their local dealership.
In this scenario, the user went from typing in a search engine to booking a test drive in three clicks, which is an ideal scenario for site architecture.
Internal links
A final concept to be aware of with site architecture are internal links. Internal links are ones which go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. They can help search engines identify content, understand the relationship between different pages on the same site, and assess the density of related content. They are commonly used in the main navigation of a site.
Internal links are used for three main reasons:
- They allow users to navigate a website more easily
- They help establish the information hierarchy of pages for a given website
- They help spread authority from the home page to other content on the website
Digital Marketing Resources:
Shane Lyons
Shane Lyons is head of Search & Analytics at Mediaworks, an award-winning media and communications agency. He has been working in Digital both in Ireland and abroad for the last 8 years and now specializes in SEO and Analytics.
Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:
The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful.
You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library
- Article: Paid vs Organic Search - Striking the Right Balance
- Article: 6 Simple But Effective SEO eCommerce Strategies
- Presentation: Testing and Benchmarking Page Speed
- Toolkit: On-Site SEO Audit Handbook and Toolkit
- Article: The Key SEO Ranking Factors You Need to Know in 2018
- Article: The Importance of Putting Mobile First
- Article: Offline-Online Attribution with Google Maps
- Article: How to Measure Your Content Marketing
You will not be assessed on this content in your final exam.
