Information Architecture – SEO ground zero

Content organization should be one of the first steps when building a website, but it is often overlooked. A flashy website and a large marketing budget will never be enough to turn a successful website if the visitor cannot find what they are looking for easily.  It is also a big part of SEO and URL structure, the deeper indexed a page is in your site the harder it will be for it to rank high.

What is deep URL structure? Take this link for example; www.mysite.com/catagory/subcatabory/product/review/specs  This URL is 5 directories deep, not the greatest for SEO and is something that can easily be changed.

First step to Information Architecture is understanding your people. There will always be more than one way of organizing them and unfortunately it isn’t always clear which way is the best way.

•    People have different needs.
•    People often have different ideas about what goes together and what doesn’t.
•    Some people may know a lot about a topic, while others may know nothing at all

You need to understand three very important things before you can design an IA that works really well:

1.People:  What they need do to, how they think and what they already know
2.Content:  What you have, what you should have and what you need
3.Context:  The business or personal goals for the site, who else will be involved and what your constraints are.

Without a good understanding of these three things, you simply can’t create a good IA.

If you don’t know enough about people you won’t be able to group content in ways that make sense to them, or provide ways for them to find it easily. Without a good understanding of your content, you won’t be able to create an information architecture that works well for current and future content. And if you don’t know all about the context, you won’t be able to create something that works for people and the business, and you’ll have endless trouble in the project.

Information Architecture is a never ending process, once built your site requires testing to see how users find the usability of your site. This can be done with surveys or hot maps to see where the click. From that research you can make adjustments to make the site better for your visitors. After all, the websites we build are for the user. A site’s bounce rate is also a good indicator, if you have a bounce rate over 60% you need to improve!

For your next website design be sure to take a moment to think about your Information Architecture and who you are trying to target. It is the first step in creating a successful website.

Author: Ryan Tomlinson AKA “ Gooder Marketing”

Comments

  1. Online Marketing London says

    Nice post.Very informative.For good online marketing the main thing is content.Any way nice post because it covers more over every aspects.

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