Information architecture

Information architecture decides whether someone can find a thing without searching, and it is fixed early and expensively. It is also the layer search engines read: the URL hierarchy, the internal links and the labels are simultaneously a navigation system and a description of what the site is about.

Good structure is discovered rather than invented, usually by watching how the people who already do the job group things. The vocabulary of the business is often wrong for the customer — a company organises by department, customers arrive by problem.

The org chart as a menu

Sites structured around internal divisions force the visitor to know how the company is organised before they can find anything. Structure by the question the visitor arrived with, and let the internal structure live in the “about” section where it belongs.

User flow

The ordered path a person takes through a product to complete one goal, including what happens when it goes wrong.

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SEO

Making a site findable by search engines for the questions its buyers actually ask — a structural property of the site far more than a list of tasks performed on it.

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Canonical URL

The one address a piece of content declares as its real one, so that every variant of it consolidates into a single entry rather than competing with itself.

All forty-five termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.