Great article today on Search Engine Land by Shari Thurow - I’ve seen Shari speak at multiple SES conventions over the years and always enjoy her insights and ability to keep things very basic and simple for the crowds.
Here is a short list of tips when determining effective website information architectures:
- With both the open and closed card sort tests, it is imperative that SEO professionals resist the urge to put words in users’ mouths. The point of usability tests for information architecture is to listen to users, and to objectively observe their behaviors and actions. You want to determine the best labels based on user/searcher mental models, not your own.
- The content that you put on the index cards (whether it’s physical index cards or the online version) is critical to the success of both usability tests. If you find that you cannot be objective in using keywords, then hire an information architect to come up with the item names.
- Sometimes, a navigation label is clear without a keyword. Resist the urge to add one for ranking reasons when the label is clear. Do not listen to the SEO Borg and think, “resistance is futile.” There are other important places on a web page that you can implement keywords… and the page can still get search engine visibility and conversions.
- Don’t imitate competitor architectures and site navigation because it makes sense to you and the competitor site ranks well. Kim Krause-Berg warned against this in her excellent article, It’s A Fatal Mistake To Copy Successful Websites. Sure it makes sense to you. And it appears to make sense to a commercial web search engine because it ranks. But it doesn’t make sense to users, and they are the ones who will ultimately purchase your products and services.
- Take off your search (querying) blinders. People who work in a “search” environment often see the “search” part of searcher behavior and not the “browse” part. Web searchers browse. They do not just type a keyword, click on a search listing, view a web page, and convert on the exact landing page. If their information scent is validated on the landing page, searchers will continue to browse a site to complete their tasks. As I said in Information Architects Are From Venus, SEOs Are From Mars , browsing and retrieval (searching) are equally important finding behaviors.
