Learning Outcome 3: Site Architecture

Having a clear game plan about structure and importance in your website is crucial to it's success and level of visibility to the user. 
There are a range of strategies you can implement to help push your website up the rankings. Here, I will discuss a few of the techniques you can employ.

Site Hierarchy 

Hierarchy is a way to let search engines know what is important in your site. Think of the site as a pyramid with the most important information at the very top represented by the Home page. The next layer of most important information should be below this in the categories sub-level and so on. The further down the pyramid you go, this should be of less importance.

Categories & sections

Categories should show users at a glance the topics available to them on the website.
These should be accurate and concise descriptions of each particular topic. If the Home page is the major 'theme' of the website then categories are the secondary themes. They must help the user to easily navigate the site. 
Google bots will think that these top level categories are linked to every other page on the website so these pages will rank better.
Identify why users are coming to the site and try and name your navigation categories appropriate keywords.

For BWM the categories could read as follows...

About Blue Water Music | Our bands | Music Links | Blue water Music Sitemap |  Contact Blue Water Music

Pages

Pages should contain specific content or services pertaining their name. Write keyword-rich copy for these pages for optimization. Keep your more important content for pages further up the hierarchy. Mapping out page types in the architecture can also help further down the road with any SEO issues that arise as you can decipher if a problem is on a single page or a page-wide issue. 

Internal linking

Good Internal links can make it easier for users to navigate around a a website. Keep it logical and think what the navigation the user will find useful relevant to where they are on the website.