Flat and Deep Structure

Flat Site Architecture for SEO

Flat architecture is the alternative to ‘deep’ or ‘nested’ architecture. Flat site architecture is an architecture in which users can reach to each page of the website in two or three links or in simple words it is an architecture where no link chains exist and every page can be reached in one, two or three links.

It is based on the logic that the more the clicks it takes to reach a page, the fewer the users who will reach it. Google Algorithm logic is to target improved usability. Putting all your content on one page that is enough to fill several pages will clog the particular page and it will be harder for users to understand.

Benefits of Flat Site Architecture

• Helps crawlers understand the content of your site.
• Visitors can more easily find the content they need.
• Fewer levels of clicks encourage an easier decision-making process among users.

Deep Site Architecture

Deep architecture uses long paths to access targeted pages on the website. A site with deep site structure will have very exact and topical pages on the website. The main disadvantage of using deep site architecture  for your website is that the website users/visitors and search engine crawlers, spiders take longer to reach the content they are looking for.

Benefits of Deep Site Architecture

• You can use a menu, categories, subcategories, and more sub categories to better arrange the content of your website
• This type of link architecture is good and suitable for organizing big websites like Wikipedia, Quora, etc.

Which Site Architecture to use Deep or Flat?

Choosing a site architecture can be a tricky task as in some cases flat site architecture will be the perfect fit if you have distinct, recognizable categories, because visitors don’t have to click through as many levels.

But in other cases if you have too many categories to show then showing them all at one level is not any easy task. In that situation we use deep site architecture by creating intermediate category pages to establish context and offering them much better view which will not confuse them.

In possible, plan about and then create your website structure like this:

• Create an overview of all pages of your new website.
• Break the website content into your core targeted categories and create a top level navigation that holds the different content types of your site.
• Create logical sub categories
• If necessary, create another sub category level and link the targeted pages from the sub category pages.