The way your site architecture is set up is very important for several reasons. First, it allows visitors to more easily find what they are looking for. When visitors can find your important pages faster and easier, they are more likely to buy from you or click on your advertising. Second, a good site architecture makes it easier for search engines such as Google to crawl and index your site. Search engines will start at one of your pages, then robotically click through links to try and find more pages on your site to index. When you have pages that take 5 or 10 clicks to get to, the chances that Google will index those pages are much smaller compared to if it only takes 1 or 2 clicks.

When you design your site architecture, you want every one of your pages to only take 2 clicks maximum to get to from your home page. Of course, there are exceptions to this. If your site has a million pages, you can allow a few extra clicks to get to some of those less important pages. However, if your site has less than around 600 pages, you should really try to make each page accessible with just 1-2 clicks from the home page.

The basics of a good site architecture is to have 10-20 links in a navigation bar on your site, depending on how large your site is. Then, on each of these 10-20 pages, you should link to 5-30 new pages. If you do the math, 20 links in your navigation bar where each page links to 30 more pages equals 600 pages. Accomplishing this is very easy if you plan this out in advance. You can certainly add more than 20 pages in your navigation bar, or, link to more than 30 pages on one page. Just be sure to keep your visitors in mind and try to find the easiest way possible to allow visitors to get to your pages

Another great way to get all of your pages easily found in 1-2 clicks is an HTML sitemap. This is one page that links to all of your other pages. Google doesn’t like you to have more than 500 links on one page, so if your site is large, you may want to break your HTML sitemap up so that you have a few HTML sitemap pages with 250-500 links. When you have an HTML sitemap, you can afford to link to less pages from your navigation bar because your HTML sitemap helps those pages get crawled by the search engines.