Shape the site so search and people can follow it.

Information architecture is how a site's pages are grouped, named and nested. Google's SEO Starter Guide says that organising a site logically can help search engines and users understand how pages relate to the rest of the site. It is also candid about limits: it advises against dropping everything to reorganise, because search engines will likely understand pages as they are now, and says the suggestions are most helpful over the long term, especially on larger sites.

The guide makes three concrete points. Descriptive URLs help, because parts of the URL can appear in results as breadcrumbs and help people judge a result. Grouping topically similar pages in directories can matter once a site has more than a few thousand URLs, because Google can learn how often the content in each directory changes and crawl directories at different frequencies. And each piece of content should be reachable through one URL, which connects architecture to duplicate content and canonicalisation.

Google's page on URL structure best practices adds requirements for a crawlable structure, such as not using URL fragments to change page content. It warns that URLs failing its criteria will likely be crawled inefficiently.

The strategic question is what the structure should be for: which sections the business needs, which searches each section should serve, and how the site will grow without becoming tangled. The technical side of architecture, including faceted navigation and large-site analysis, is covered on the architecture page under Technical SEO.

A topic strategy decides which subjects a site should be known for and how its content covers them. An entity is a distinct, identifiable thing, such as a business, person, product or place. An entity strategy is about making clear what the site is about and how those things relate. Google does not publish a page on entity strategy, so the framing here is general explanation; the sources below support the parts they cover.

Google's helpful content guidance is relevant to topic choice. Among its questions is whether a site has a primary purpose or focus. Among its warning signs are producing lots of content on many different topics in the hope some will perform, and entering a niche mainly because it might bring search traffic. A topic strategy is a deliberate answer to both.

Structured data is one way to state meaning explicitly. Google's introduction to structured data says you can help Google understand a page by giving explicit clues about its meaning, in a standardised format that classifies the content. Which types of markup suit a site follows from what the site is about, which is why it belongs in the strategy and not only in implementation.

Entities also matter beyond Google's results. On our AI & Search Visibility page we describe the question as whether it is clear who you are, what you do and how you relate to your topic. The technical detail is on the structured data and entities page, and the answer-engine side is on the machine understanding page.

Internal links connect a site's pages to each other. Google's link best practices say that Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. The SEO Starter Guide adds that the vast majority of new pages Google finds each day are found through links.

The link guidance sets out several practical rules. Google can generally crawl a link only if it is an <a> element with an href attribute, and links inserted with JavaScript are fine if they use that markup. Anchor text should be descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages. Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on the site. And there is no magical ideal number of links per page, although if it seems like too many, it probably is.

A strategy decides which pages should be linked from where, with what wording, and why. Without one, internal links can accumulate by accident. Hypothetical examples: navigation that mirrors internal departments, important pages that sit deep in the site, or anchor text that is generic. A strategy ties the links to the architecture and the topics above, so that related pages reinforce each other and the pages that matter most to the business are easy to reach.

Search Console's Links report shows a sample of internal and external links, which helps in checking the result. Google states that it is not a comprehensive list of every link, so treat it as a guide and not a full record. The technical work of auditing links is described on the architecture page.