SEO Relevancy and Goal-led Information Architecture
(Part 1 of 2)
Almost everything that is uploaded onto your website communicates something to Google, MSN, Yahoo, ASK, and other search engines (and of course your visitors). Each of these search engines wants to promote themselves as the preferred choice for relevant search results, and as such are working hard to achieve just that. Knowing this is vital to optimising websites, as your next goal is to make sure that you communicate your website in a way that attracts the attention of search engines to your relevant results, and thus get well qualified visitors to your site.
The topic of information architecture (IA) is broader than a single blog post by far, so to help organise the information, we have broken the topic into two sections: the first will help you understand certain decisions around information architecture for your website and the second part, it's relevancy to search engines.
By touching on these areas, we hope that this will prompt consideration over your own website, and help propel your website forward in how it communicates with search engines and visitors.
What is Information Architecture?
Initially, information architecture was important to web designers and developers, to create sites that considered such things as site navigation, user-experience, accessibility, focus-points, visitor funnelling through call-to-actions, and of course maintenance of the site. Now though, it also has ramifications for optimising a website too.
Information architecture answers the questions: what is the best way to order information on a website? This is a matter of building informational priorities. Consider these points as a starting point:
- Does a visitor want a list of information?
- A summary of information?
- A snippet of information that then expands into more detail?
- Are visitors typically unsure of what exactly they are looking for so need to be taken on a trail of discovery via prompts or call to actions?
- Are the visitors exploring a broad topic or a single issue?
- Are they visiting / searching using the product or services name, or it's function?
- What kind of a priority are specifications and help and advice pages?
- Are they searching for various media types: text, images, videos, demonstrations, downloads?
- Does the organisation of the information need to change as a visitor moves through the site?
- Organisation of information types (top-level domain, sub-domains, directories/folders, multiple languages, media types, navigation categories, hubs of information, actual pages)
...there are many interpretations of information architecture, but there is no one 'correct way'. Design the website's IA around your ideal visitor's goals. Poor information architecture can lead to crawling errors, low rankings and even stop the search engine from indexing your site at all. Your visitors will be more than happy with the results too!
Read part 2 of this article on information architecture and SEO as the building blocks of a successful website.
Posted By: Ben
25 September 2008