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 (what Google calls 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 — the "Home › Category › Page" trail — plus BreadcrumbList schema (machine-readable labels, covered next lesson) to reinforce hierarchy.
- Maintain an accurate XML sitemap — the file listing every page you want indexed — and submit it in Search Console.
Plan for scale
For large sites generated from templates, design the templates and linking patterns up front. Good architecture is far cheaper to build in than to retrofit.