Flat, logical, and shallow
Aim for a structure where any important page is reachable within ~3 clicks of the home page. Organize by topic: home → category/hub → detail pages, with hubs linking to their children and back.
Internal links are your control panel
- They distribute authority (PageRank) to the pages you most want to rank.
- They define topical clusters so engines understand relationships.
- They guide crawlers to new and deep pages.
Link from strong, high-traffic pages to important targets with descriptive anchors. Fix orphans (no inbound internal links) — they're invisible to both users and crawlers.
URLs, breadcrumbs, sitemaps
- Keep URLs short, readable, and stable. Don't change them casually; 301 when you must.
- Use breadcrumbs (with BreadcrumbList schema) to reinforce hierarchy.
- Maintain an accurate XML sitemap of indexable URLs and submit it in Search Console.
Plan for scale
For large/programmatic sites, design templates and linking patterns up front. Good architecture is far cheaper to build in than to retrofit.