Chances are you have heard the phrase “information architecture” plenty of times in the past. But, if you haven’t given it a passing glance you may want to rethink your stance. Information architecture is the semantic structure and organization of digital inventories. Since SEO is concerned with giving the search engine spiders easily understood relevant content while making the website user-friendly, information architecture is a very important aspect.

A website’s architecture is composed of domains sections, categories, pages and media, among other items. Domains are the top level of the structure, potentially housing multiple sub-domains. Sections are the organizational hubs that hold categories, and occasionally other sections. Categories are reference points for pages and media. Pages are web documents in a variety of languages such as HTML, PHP or ASP. And media are images, videos, pdfs, sound files and so on.

So what are some things you should avoid for the best SEO results on a site? Well, first of all is duplicate content. Search engines only show one version of a page so if they crawl the same thing 5 times, the time spent doing that is wasted. The same goes for print pages. With either of these you should try to use a unique URL folder structure to modify those files so the robots don’t crawl them.

Another big issue is canonical problems. These allow users to find your site both with and without the “www” before the domain name. Crawlers think these are two different websites that have copied one another and this leads to an enormous problem with duplicate content.

So, what are some things you should do to enhance your information architecture for SEO? Definitely try to make your hierarchy as clean and simple as possible. Ensure that your navigation is consistent and that it’s always in the same place on your site. This makes it easier for crawlers and humans alike. Another helpful thing to do is to use cross-linking. This is when you are browsing a site and they have suggestions along the bottom for similar things on their site you may be interested in.

Knowing more about information architecture is crucial to SEO, but it also helps user interaction. And at the end of the day that’s just as, if not more, important to the success of a site.

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