Information architecture for links
Tuesday December 23, 2008
When most designers think of information architecture, if they think of it at all, they think of the hierarchy of their site. In other words, they think about the site structure, the navigation, and the location of various pages on the site in relation to the navigation. But the reality is that information architecture is about links. What links where and how it is linked. According to Google, you want to keep the most important pages close to your home page, or only 1 or 2 clicks away. This is really useful to your readers, but it's also helpful for the Googlebot. The best way to create links for information architecture includes:
- text links - these are more readily crawled by search engine spiders and are more accessible in general
- link to your most important pages from your home page
- have links back to your home page and other important pages from every inner page on your site
Comments
Thanks for writing about this subject. I think it is very important to know.
Sometimes I come across websites and when I click on a link, I get lost, because I don’t know how to get back to the homepage/the page I came from (well, except of clicking the back button 281749274 times) and it’s like a labyrinth.