Hello all my fellow SEO/IA friends!
Welcome back to Infrastructure Architecture Wednesday! This is a series of posts that shows you a little bit of how to integrate Infrastructure Architecture (IA) with search engine optimization (SEO).
At long last, we are going to wrap up one major system in IA -labeling. For those of you who missed the previous posts, here are the links. You may want to catch up on those before reading this final article about your website labeling system.
Infrastructure Architecture and SEO – Part 1
IA Labeling and SEO – Part 2
Labeling System and SEO – Part 3
Labeling and SEO – Part 4
OK, so let’s finish this up.
What if you don’t have the budget and/or time to do card sorting? Try something simpler to get a collection of label suggestions by conducting a free-listing session. All free-listing is where someone picks an item and everyone at the table provides terms (“labels”) that can be used as alternates to describe it.
You can do it face-face or via any web-based survey tool. Your choice.
The people who participate should be your desired audience, or know the target market very, very well. You can rank and order the results from most used to least used, or something along those lines.
Now, if you have a humongous website, you need to wrap your arms around and limit which of the content you’re going to do this exercise for; otherwise, you’ll spend forever just arguing over labels.
The ultimate set of labels you choose should be those that your desired web visitor will immediately understand and embrace. If she does this, she’s going to travel deeper into your website by staying longer and visiting more pages. That looks great on your analytics dashboard.
Look for any trends or patterns in the labels your group comes up with. Is there a lot of insider language used, or acronyms? Might some of the terms be confused with other industries or disciplines?
Don’t forget to analyze search engine queries for easily understood labels, as well as your website analytics in the keyword section. See which ones are used the most, or dump all the words into a table or spreadsheet and sort them. Remember, we’re labeling our pages for our target audience, not us.
In addition, tagging provides a lot of good words and phrases your reader is familiar with. Be careful if they’re too broad though – simply using “computer” or “”mp3 player” is too vague, especially if you only deal in specific sub items like gaming laptops or one brand name digital music player. Use those instead.
Now, take that list and sort it alphabetically. Remove duplicates and begin looking for consistent words to form your final labeling system. Your labeling system may be sorted by topic, by location, by item type, by brand or even by a specific name.
The bottom line is, does it clearly communicate to your target audience what she’ll find on that page? If you can say yes, you’ve created a good label.
This doesn’t mean you won’t go back and alter some after reviewing each web page’s performance in analytics. You may well get feedback or see that some pages aren’t visited much. If so, review the label and make sure it’s accurate.
As always, I learn from the very comprehensive, excellent book called “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.” It’s written by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld. If you’re really serious about adding IA to your portfolio, it’s the book to read.
Now that we’re done with the labeling systems, it’s onto navigation systems that are part of IA. Tune in next week!
And if you’re just getting into search engine optimization (SEO), Search Engine Academy can teach and certify you in SEO with the most up to date processes, skills and techniques so you can boost any web page’s search results.
Until next Wednesday, be the best SEOer you can be!
