Welcome back to another blog post on infrastructure architecture through Search Engine Academy. Every Wednesday we publish a new blog post about some aspect of infrastructure architecture and how it relates to search engine optimization (SEO). Let’s continue talking about labels and how to use SEO to make them great.
Labels can describe any type of content that we have on our websites. You can talk about site pages and content – labels simply represent the content that we have on our site to make it easier for searchers in our browsers to find exactly what they need.
Okay, we need to use labels very accurately to get our pages to stand out from one another. It’s a real big challenge, and we will talk about some different kinds of labels, how we can use them and how they relate to search engine optimization (SEO).
Let’s say that you have a website for children. Iconic labels can work really well for kids as long as they’re easily recognizable and very universal. Otherwise, for adults they probably have extremely limited use. If you’re going to use icons you need to make certain that your target audience is very familiar with the pictures that you’re going to use. If most of your audience is not at all familiar with them you can lose people completely. One way to you can use icons is if you have content or words underneath the labels. That helps a lot but it can take up a lot of room. If it’s a keyword phrase that you’re using for a label then that might work, but use them sparingly because otherwise they could really clutter up a website pretty bad.
Now, designing labels that are really effective is probably the most difficult part of your information architecture efforts. Language is so ambiguous and trying to apply it to a label can be difficult to use, since there are probably multiple words in a language that could apply to a label.
And this is where SEO can really come in handy. Let’s say you’ve done your keyword research and you have a lot of really good keyword phrases and if you have some that are very short, like one or two words then you can use those for labels because your target user coming to your website will see that keyword phrase relative to what you offering on your website and she’s going to understand it really well – much better than if you only use icon labels, for example.
Whenever possible, narrow the scope of your label down to the smallest parts that you possibly can. For example, you may use a label for a page about laptop computers for gamers. Keep the labels focused and simple for your web visitor. It will be difficult to use long tail keywords for your labels, so in doing a keyword research for example, you’re probably going to need to be selective in what you’ll use for labels on your web pages on your website.
Here’s an important point to keep mind: you want to develop a consistent labeling system throughout your entire website – not just labels themselves. If you remember back reading the other IA post, if you use the word “home” to describe your homepage make sure that you use it consistently throughout your entire site. Don’t use ” home” on one page and then use your company name on another page that sends the visitor back to your homepage. It’s very confusing, so consistency is the key, and again, this is where your keyword research can really help you narrow it down and really develop effective consistent labels.
Consistency is important because it means predictability, and the more predictable that you can make your website the easier it is for your visitors to navigate through the entire site and go deeper into your pages. Of course, this is what we want! Visitors stay on our site, read lots of our pages and select us as a business solution provider.
That’s going to do it for our blog post this week on infrastructure architecture and SEO. We’ll continue this post on labeling systems next week. If you’d like to know more about how to do SEO for your own site, please visit Search Engine Academy’s website and discover our different training options for you with our two, three or five day courses. Until next time, take a look at the labeling systems on your site and start thinking about how you can make them consistent and comprehensive, but at same time meeting the challenge of keeping them simple.
All the best to you,
