One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your website are as accessible as possible to the search engines. It’s not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, but also the internal pages within a site’s structure.

Search engines use “robots” (also known as “bots” or “spiders”) to find content on the web for inclusion in their index. When a robot finds a document it includes the contents within the search engine’s index, then follows the next links it can find and continues the process of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomes apparent that the navigational structure of a website is important in getting all the pages of a site indexed.

When considering the navigational structure of your site, the hierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines judge what they feel to be the most important pages of a site when considering rankings. The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site .From here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and so forth.

The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together. Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links, meaning Flash links, JavaScript links and dropdown will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also typically ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated website.The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic HTML text links, as not only can they be followed by robots but the text contained in the anchor can also be used to describe the destination page.

The most natural way to organise content on a website is to categorise it. Break down your products, services or information into related categories and then structure this so that the most important aspects are linked to from the homepage. Adding a sitemap to your website is nice idea to help robot reach all the pages of a website. If you link to a sitemap from your homepage then it gives a robot easy access to all of the pages within your site.