Architecture for SEO
What is SEO architecture?
Everything above the content of the file - so:
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image name and titles
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link text and titles
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file names
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folder/subdirectory names.
Keep your most important information "near the top".
The Information Architecture Institute defines "information architecture as the art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability."
Meet users' expectations - don't force them to learn a special way of doing things just for your web site, or navigating around it - they wont like or appreciate and will probably leave.
Sitemaps
It is still considered to be prudent to produce sitemaps. I would suggest that while an xml Sitemaps for search engine submission is an essential necessity, if your site is fairly small (between 10-150 pages), it is still a good idea to build an html sitemaps - a page with contains a full break-out listing of all the pages in your site, organised by sections in which they appear.
HTML sitemaps may not always look pretty but that isn't really the point. It is there to provide your visitors with a visual map of the way your site is organised, and it will also help search engines more fully index your web site.
Some free tools to help you make xml sitemaps:
Google Sitemaps Generator - Free Site Map Builder, XML Sitemaps, Easy
SoftPlus GSite Crawler is a decent tool for larger web sites
There are also a couple of places around the web that will help you build an HTML sitemaps - best to just strip out the guts of the resulting page and paste it into your design template.
Custom 404 pages
Consider a custom 404 page too. Now with Google widget...
SEO Architecture Checklist:
The old 3-click rule has fallen out of favour somewhat seeing as how search engine results will often dump visitors right deep into your site structure, and folks will rarely just arrive at your home page and start navigating around from there, but it is still a good idea not to bury your gold too deep.
A newer interpretation of the useful aspects of this rule is to avoid more than 3 levels of directory in your site structure.
