Now more than ever, it seems the world is changing. Not too long ago, I spoke about tipping for SEO and digital marketing, which is causing high-growth companies to drive even faster.

And then, of course, Google changes an average of 12 things per day in Search, and websites are being impacted for things they aren’t even doing wrong.

Yet with all these changes, the basics of SEO remain the same. It is important not to lose sight of the fundamentals that we know make a difference. They make a difference in Google’s ranking algorithm and make a difference to businesses trying to remain relevant and competitive online.

That is why SEO basics are the foundation of any successful website. Let’s look at this idea in more detail.

• What is an evergreen SEO strategy? 
• What are some basic SEO strategies that get results?
• FAQ: How can I implement an effective evergreen SEO strategy to stay competitive in an ever-changing digital landscape? 

What Is an Evergreen SEO Strategy?

No matter what changes are thrown our way, a basic and dependable approach to SEO helps a company’s online presence weather those changes.

That approach includes the following SEO principles:

1. Beat the competition, not the algorithm
2. Focus on a whole-SERP SEO strategy
3. Optimize to be the least imperfect

1. Beat the Competition, Not the Algorithm

There are countless ranking signals in Google’s algorithm, with thousands of updates made yearly to Search. So it’s safe to say that no one will know exactly what the search engine algorithm is looking for.

We do the best we can with the information that’s available to us and the wisdom we have from years of practice, success and failure. We stay on top of developments and test them over and over again.

However, instead of focusing on every little algorithmic possibility, we instead focus on our competition. Our competition is the content ranking on Page 1 of the search results. And we discover that competition through keyword research (more on that later).

For more, read:

• SEO Should Beat the Competition, Not the Algorithm

2. Focus on a Whole-Serp Strategy

With keywords in tow, you will be able to see what types of search engine results are most prominent for those queries. You will prioritize your SEO and content development efforts there.

For example, some search queries will have more prominent video results, images, or perhaps featured snippets.

In other words, don’t just focus on the “blue links.” When you approach SEO and content development by understanding which features Google believes are the most relevant for a query, you evergreen your SEO program.

For more, read:

• What Is a Whole-SERP SEO Strategy?

Optimize To Be the Least Imperfect

Analyze the content and the webpages that are ranking for your desired keywords. What are they doing well? What can you do better?

As mentioned, the goal of SEO is not to try to beat the ranking algorithm, which is infinitely large. The goal of SEO is to beat the competition. And the way to do that is to be least imperfect compared to the competition. Every website is imperfect against the Google algorithm. And when Google evaluates which pages to serve in its search results, it chooses the least imperfect compared to others for that search.

For more, read:

• How to Do Competitor Research for SEO

What Are Some Basic SEO Strategies That Get Results?

Here are five basic SEO strategies that are proven to get results:

1. Keyword and audience research
2. Information architecture aka SEO siloing
3. Quality content
4. Technical and on-page optimization
5. Linking practices

1. Keyword and Audience Research

SEO keywords are single words or short phrases that represent the search queries that people use in a search engine. Once you have identified your keywords and explored the intent behind them (i.e. what a person is trying to accomplish when they use them in Google), you can do the following and more:

• Identify and speak the language of the target market
• Create useful content for your target audience
• Communicate to Google that a webpage is a relevant match for a query
• Drive more qualified traffic to appropriate webpages

For more, read:

• What Are Keywords and Why Are They Important to SEO?
• SEO Guide: Keyword Research – How To Select Keywords

2. Information Architecture aka SEO Siloing

How you organize the content on your site matters for search engines and users. SEO siloing builds relevance for a website and positions it as an authority on a topic. It also helps website visitors navigate the content with ease, and get complete answers to their questions.

For more, read:

• SEO Siloing: What, Why, How
• 5 Times When SEO Siloing Can Make or Break Search Engine Rankings
• SEO Guide: Siloing – How to Structure Your Website

3. Quality Content

Google wants to display the most useful content to its search engine users. So quality content is likely the most important ranking factor to get right.

For more, read:

• What Makes a Webpage Quality?
• 5 Steps To Help Writers Create Expert Content for SEO

4. Technical and On-Page Optimization

The performance of your website matters to website visitors. That is why you need to make sure that the site provides a good user experience. You do this through technical SEO practices that optimize the back-end of the website.

In addition, you want to help Google understand what a webpage is about, and this can be accomplished through on-page SEO.

For more, read:

• The Always-Up-To-Date SEO Checklist
• Technical SEO vs. On-page SEO
• SEO Guide: Technical SEO Tips

5. Linking Practices

How you link to other webpages matters in SEO. There are three primary strategies in linking:

1. Internal links: How you link to pages within your website
2. Outbound links: Which websites do you link to
3. Inbound links: Which websites link to you

Each type of linking strategy has its own best practices. It is important to strive for quality and relevance with every link.

For more, read:

• A Jam-Packed Guide on Internal Linking for SEO
• What Are Outbound Links and Why Are They Important?
• The New Link-Building Manifesto: A Complete Guide to Earning Links That Count

Without the basics of SEO, websites suffer when Google changes things or we experience economic or market downturns. This results in knee-jerk reactions that end up costing businesses more in the end than an upfront investment in evergreen SEO strategies.

Looking to add an evergreen SEO strategy to your company plan? Talk to us. We can help.

FAQ: How can I implement an effective evergreen SEO strategy to stay competitive in an ever-changing digital landscape?

With search engine algorithms frequently changing and competition intensifying, adopting an evergreen SEO strategy is essential to remain competitive in the long run.

An evergreen SEO strategy focuses on core principles that remain effective regardless of algorithmic shifts. The key is prioritizing beating the competition rather than chasing after ever-changing search engine algorithms. Conducting thorough keyword research to identify and understand your competition is the first step. By analyzing what content ranks on Page 1 of search results for your target keywords, you gain valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies and areas for improvement.

Adopting a Whole-SERP approach is a crucial aspect of a successful evergreen SEO strategy. It goes beyond focusing solely on traditional blue links in search results. Instead, consider the various features that Google deems relevant for a specific query, such as featured snippets, images, videos, or knowledge graphs. By understanding which elements are prominent for your target keywords, you can tailor your SEO and content development efforts accordingly to maximize visibility and engagement.

Optimizing to be the least imperfect compared to your competition is another fundamental principle of an evergreen SEO strategy. Instead of obsessing over trying to outsmart the ever-changing ranking algorithms, concentrate on delivering the best possible user experience and content quality. Analyze the webpages that rank for your desired keywords and learn from their strengths. By providing more value to your audience and addressing their needs comprehensively, you increase your chances of ranking higher in search results.

Implementing evergreen SEO strategies involves five proven practices:

1. Conduct comprehensive keyword and audience research to understand user intent and create targeted content.
2. Optimize your website’s information architecture using SEO siloing to establish authority on specific topics and improve navigation.
3. Prioritize producing high-quality content that caters to your audience’s needs, as it remains the most significant ranking factor.
4. Ensure technical and on-page optimization to enhance user experience and facilitate search engine understanding.
5. Adopt effective linking practices including internal, outbound and inbound links to build authority and relevance for your website.

Mastering the art of evergreen SEO is essential for staying competitive in the ever-changing digital landscape. By focusing on beating the competition, understanding user intent and delivering high-quality, valuable content, businesses can create a solid foundation for long-term online success.

Step-by-Step Evergreen SEO Strategy Implementation: 

1. Conduct comprehensive keyword research to identify relevant target keywords.
2. Analyze competitor content that ranks on Page 1 of search results for your chosen keywords.
3. Identify areas for improvement and potential content gaps in your niche.
4. Develop a Whole-SERP strategy by considering different types of search engine results for your target queries.
5. Prioritize content creation that aligns with your audience’s search intent.
6. Implement SEO siloing to organize your website content and establish topic authority.
7. Optimize website navigation for user-friendly access to relevant content.
8. Focus on producing high-quality, valuable content that addresses your audience’s needs and queries.
9. Ensure technical SEO practices to improve website performance and user experience.
10. Optimize on-page elements such as meta tags, headers and content structure.
11. Utilize internal linking to guide users to related content within your website.
12. Employ outbound links to reputable sources that support and complement your content.
13. Seek quality inbound links from authoritative websites in your industry.
14. Monitor and analyze website performance and rankings regularly.
15. Continuously update and improve your content to remain relevant and valuable.
16. Stay up-to-date with industry trends and algorithm changes to adapt your strategy.
17. Leverage social media and other promotional channels to drive traffic to your content.
18. Encourage user engagement and interaction with your content.
19. Monitor and respond to feedback and comments from your audience.
20. Continuously evaluate and refine your evergreen SEO strategy based on performance metrics and changing market demands.

The post Why SEO Basics Still Matter + Evergreen SEO Tips appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

And then what if I told you that there was a proven way to structure your website to:

• Boost its relevancy for search engines
• Drive more organic search traffic
• And gain a massive competitive advantage?

Let me tell you more …

It’s an SEO strategy that’s been around for a while, yet the majority of brands — even bigger brands — aren’t utilizing its power to improve their site’s rankings, relevance and usability.

You’ll gain a competitive advantage as I explain in this post:

• Why website architecture is the key to making your site relevant to the search engines.
• How the organization of your content positions you as a subject matter expert and creates a good user experience.
• Case studies that show the power of website architecture for SEO.

Website Architecture: The Wrong Way

It may or may not surprise you that the majority of website designers and developers are not skilled in search engine optimization.

Yet, these are the folks who are in charge of designing your website.

And the design of your site, from the code to the layout to the architecture, impacts your SEO strategy.

So why aren’t more brands building SEO into their website from the start? Simply put: no one is really talking about SEO during a website launch or redesign.

Most brands today design their sites like brochures, focusing on colors, look and feel and high-level business objectives.

Topic-focused content organization is overlooked. The problem with that is it doesn’t create subject matter expertise in the search engines’ eyes.

If you were a search engine, which of these would you rather show to users?

The garage without order or the garage with a clear focus?

Our job as website publishers is to help the search engines better understand what our business is about.

To do that, we have to hit the mark when it comes to look and feel and colors, but also content depth and organization. Google’s algorithms are getting smarter, but they still need a lot of help.

To better understand that a business is about X and has subject matter expertise about X, you need to create a cluster of organized content around X versus just mentioning it in a few words on pages randomly throughout your site.

And by the way, doing this will help you in a RankBrain world, where the machine learning AI system is working hard to match a search query to the best possible website.

Website Architecture for SEO

OK, now let’s talk about the right way to structure a site for SEO.

We invented the concept of siloing for SEO 17 years ago and have taught and written about siloing ever since.

This is something you should consider when you’re launching a new website, redesigning an old website or trying to implement a more powerful SEO strategy.

Organizing your website’s content, through directory structure and links, in a way that conveys subject matter expertise to search engines is an SEO methodology I devised years ago, and it’s called siloing.

Siloing is organizing a website’s content by heavily queried themes to make it clear what topics a site is about.

Put another way, siloing attempts to take a website with disjointed areas of focus and make sense of it by organizing the content.

Why is this important? A disorganized site doesn’t clearly convey what it is about. So a disorganized site can negatively impact your search rankings, and thus traffic.

When you organize your website content by topic or theme, search engines can see that you have sufficient content around Topic X, and that you are probably a relevant choice for a query on X.

Remember, one of Google’s key recommendations is to have a site with a clear structure and information-rich content.

Here’s an excerpt of Google’s recommendations from its Webmaster Guidelines:

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it …
• Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.

Siloing: What You Need to Know

Siloing is a highly technical and strategic SEO process. I won’t go into the technical details here, although you can find them in this guide to SEO siloing.

Instead, I’m going to share with you the guiding rules of siloing, so that you can consider it for your own website.

Siloing starts with sufficient website content around the topics and ideas that are crucial to your business.

In SEO-speak, your site needs to have lots of content that uses your target keywords.

Let’s look at an example. Say your website sells power tools. A website with disorganized focus may cover all the types of power tools on one page.

A website that has siloed its content might instead organize the various types of power tools it sells like this:

And by the way, each one of those pages represents a primary target search keyword and mentions the keywords common to their own themes.

This is not only a way to create a more streamlined user experience for your visitors, but also a way to tell Google that you are an expert on the various categories of power tools you sell.

That’s because there’s a clear hierarchical structure that makes it easy for search engine bots to crawl and understand the relationships and focus of topics.

In its simplest terms, here are the steps for how to do siloing for SEO:

Step 1 to siloing is knowing your keywords.
Step 2 is understanding how people search.
Step 3 is having ample content.
Step 4 is organizing topics and supporting topics hierarchically.
Step 5 is using internal links to connect related pages.

All of these pieces are critical to establishing your site as an expert.
The technical implementation instructions for SEO siloing are outlined here.

But now, let’s look at some results, shall we?

The Power of Siloing: 2 Case Studies

Siloing is a foundational component of our SEO services, and clients see powerful results.

Let’s look at a couple examples of real client results now.

Understand that the siloing strategy in these cases didn’t exist in a vacuum. There were other SEO-driven revisions that occurred along with the website architecture edits and internal linking of siloing. However, it is our experience that every SEO tactic is amplified once siloing is in place.

Case Study No. 1: Manufacturer of Custom, Specialty Home Construction Parts

This client came to us due to a link penalty from Penguin. But they also wanted us to migrate their site from a .net domain to their Unix-based .com, and from a custom CMS to WordPress. We found this to be a perfect opportunity to silo their content.

For this engagement, we did the following:

• Link pruning
• Physical and virtual siloing
• Reorganized navigation
• Internal contextual linking to related pages
• Breadcrumb linking
• Targeted anchor text
• On-page title tag and meta description optimization

Here are the results:

• 107 percent increase year-over-year (YoY) organic traffic, from around 9,000 visits per month to around 20,000 visits per month
• 30,000 additional organic visits YoY in Q4
• 90 percent increase in tracked online revenue YoY
• 88 percent increase in number of transactions YoY

Case Study No. 2: Insurance Plans and Easy Enrollment Website

This client had a new domain with very little content. They needed to identify the top keywords to target and the supporting content that would help them reinforce their primary keywords. Site architecture and internal linking structure would need to be established.

Here’s what we did:

• Physical and virtual siloing
• Reorganized navigation
• Internal contextual linking to related pages
• Breadcrumb linking
• Targeted anchor text
• On-page title tag and meta description optimization

And here are the results we saw:

• 327 percent increase YoY in Google organic traffic, from around 2,000 visits per month during Q4 2015 to around 10,000 visits per month during Q4 2016
• 19,000 additional Google organic visits YoY in Q4

Start Siloing for a Competitive Advantage

Siloing can be the most powerful tool in your SEO arsenal, and yet many brands aren’t even aware of it. Talk about a competitive advantage to siloing adopters.

If your website needs a boost in relevancy and a lift in organic search traffic, siloing your web content and organizing your link structure is just the thing to do that.

Tell me your own siloing experience in the comments.

Would you want to discuss more about how you can be helped? Let’s talk.

This article just scratches the surface of the most powerful SEO tactic, siloing. Send your technical search marketing team to SEO training with me to learn how to do it for your business.

The post The Competition-Busting SEO Strategy No One Is Talking About: Siloing Your Site appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

• Conversions
• Strategy
• FAQ: How can I enhance my website’s SEO through a strategic content plan? 

Conversions

Let’s start with conversions. It is crucial to have clear goals that your website should accomplish for both your business and its visitors. These goals include quote requests, phone calls, store locators, appointment scheduling, subscriptions, or video views. You can align your site design and content offerings by clearly defining your conversions.

Once you have defined your conversions, it’s time to inventory your content and identify areas that require updates. Conduct a thorough crawl of your web pages and create a spreadsheet that includes important details such as URL, HTTP status, last modified date, title tag, description tag, keywords tag, H1 tag, external links, and snippets of body text. This inventory will help you identify outdated content, pages with errors, and main theme hub pages that should receive more attention.

Analyze your page’s traffic sources and determine which sources bring your website the most traffic. Identify the pages where visitors spend more time and the pages they quickly bounce from. This data will provide valuable insights into user behavior and help you prioritize your content updates.

In addition to analyzing performance, gathering user feedback is essential. Take the time to read your website and navigate through its various sections. Reacquaint yourself with the site’s navigation, information, conversion paths, and search traffic. Ask friends or colleagues to read your pages and provide feedback. Conduct user tests by having individuals navigate through specific scenarios and record their experiences. This feedback will give you a better understanding of how your customers are experiencing your site and help you identify areas for improvement.

Strategy

With a clear understanding of user behavior and feedback, it’s time to implement your strategy. Consider your website’s architecture and ensure it aligns with how users navigate it. Implement SEO siloing techniques, where each big idea or category of your website becomes a pillar with supporting content. Link relevant pages within each silo to maintain a concentrated theme and improve rankings due to subject relevance. Our SEO guide provides a step-by-step process for structuring your website through SEO siloing.

Now that your strategy is in place, it’s time to update your content. Review the inventory spreadsheet and identify pages that need updates or new content creation. Assign keywords to each page that align with its theme and optimize the content for search engines and user experience. Use tools like the SEOToolSet Single Page Analyzer to analyze content optimization and ensure keywords are effectively used. Make sure each page accomplishes its intended purpose and has a clear call to action. Consider how pages link to each other to guide users through the site and discover more relevant content.

To manage the content update process, assign priorities to different pages, and set deadlines for completion. This will help you stay organized and ensure timely progress. Additionally, consider testing different versions of your new content to gather insights on performance. Tools like Content Experiments in Google Analytics allow you to serve different page variations to your visitors’ segments and measure each version’s impact.

Ready to transform your clients’ apprehension into social media success? Partner with our SEO team to navigate fears, unlock opportunities, and propel their business to digital greatness. Contact us. 

FAQ: How can I enhance my website’s SEO through a strategic content plan?

Optimizing your website for search engines is crucial to ensuring online success. Strategic content plans can be one of the best ways to boost the search engine optimization of your website and increase its online visibility. Let’s discuss how we can work together on developing one together.

1. Understanding Buyer Intent:

Begin by identifying the buyer intent search terms relevant to your business. What are users searching for when they land on your site? Conduct thorough keyword research to understand your audience’s needs and align your content with those queries.

2. Quality Over Quantity:

Crafting high-quality content is paramount. Google’s algorithms prioritize content that adds value and answers users’ queries. Ensure your content is well-written, relevant, and engaging, providing a meaningful experience for your audience.

3. Strategic Keyword Placement:

Integrate your target keywords strategically. Place them in the title, meta descriptions, headers, and naturally throughout the content. However, avoid keyword stuffing, as it can harm your SEO efforts.

4. Content Variety:

Diversify your content types. Incorporate blog posts, infographics, videos, and other formats to cater to different audience preferences. This keeps your content fresh and appeals to a broader audience.

5. Regular Content Updates:

Search engines favor regularly updated content. Develop a content calendar and consistently update your website with fresh, relevant information. This signals to search engines that your site is active and reliable.

Transitioning smoothly from one aspect to another ensures a comprehensive understanding of how a strategic content plan can significantly impact your SEO efforts.

Step-by-Step Guide: Enhancing SEO through a Strategic Content Plan

1. Identify Buyer Intent: Begin by researching and understanding the specific search terms reflecting user intent for your industry.
2. Quality Content Creation: Develop high-quality, informative content that addresses your audience’s needs and provides real value.
3. Keyword Integration: Strategically incorporate target keywords in titles, meta descriptions, headers, and naturally throughout your content.
4. Content Variety: For maximum reach, diversify your content to reach a wider audience with infographics, blog posts, videos, and more.
5. Maintain Regular Updates: Create a content calendar so your website remains fresh with informational updates.
6. Engage with Your Audience: Encourage user interaction through comments, social media, and other channels to boost engagement signals.
7. Optimize for Mobile: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly; mobile optimization is crucial for SEO.
8. Page Load Speed: Optimize your website’s speed to enhance user experience and satisfy search engine algorithms.
9. Internal Linking: Strategically incorporate internal links to guide users to other relevant content on your site.
10. Backlink Strategy: Develop a backlink strategy using your high-quality content to build authoritative links, enhancing your site’s credibility in the eyes of search engines.

A strategic content plan is the cornerstone of effective SEO. Understanding buyer intent, creating high-quality content, and implementing various strategies can significantly enhance your website’s visibility in search engine results. Keep evolving your content plan to stay ahead in the ever-changing digital marketing landscape.

This article was updated on December 15, 2023.

The post Keep Your Website Fresh with These Strategies for Updating Your Content appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Of course, the 1st session I chose to liveblog is on Information Architecture. Because I’m an I.A. nut. :-) And this one should be killer!

Moderator:

Bill Hunt, Founder/President Backazimuth

Speakers:

• Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
• Eleanor Hong, Lead Editor, SEO, ABCNews.com

Here we go!

Adam Audette was scheduled to moderate, however he couldn’t get here on time. It was tragic seeing his “stuck at PDX” tweet, then the eventual “gonna be late” tweet from SFO… He’s an awesome guy. Good thing I got to catch his IA session at BlueglassLA! [ED: Also covered here.] Bill Hunt is pinch-hitting.

Shari’s up first…

Watch out people -Shari’s on her game today…

We’re going to talk about the myths and misconceptions around the concept of SEO and Information Architecture.

Why should we care about IA? Customers – if they can’t find information, they leave. Brand Value – people remember the web sites that didn’t deliver them the content they wanted. Design, Development costs – bad IA – the million dollar mistake. How much time does it take to create a web site? To plan it, build it out?

IA can save a site money if it’s done right. With poor IA, duplicate content problems, management becomes more complex…

Site maintenance – good IA saves money – people know where to put content.

Good IA will communicate aboutness to search engines and users. The engines will get people to the right place on your site.

Find-ability

SEO is very much a part of that. SEO addresses the query portion. But they also find it by browsing, and asking their community.

Crawlability

Can’t access the site, can’t get found.

Rankings and how listings appear are also affected.

Sitelinks can appear in the results, headings appear. They can click and end up in the middle of a page if it’s done right.

What is Information Architecture?

SEO sees crawlability, indexation, sculpting (which doesn’t work Shari says), siloing (not very effective), server performance (not IA but SEOs think it is), interface – which Shari also says is not part of IA.

IA Is:

Structural design of info, combination of organization, labeling, search (retrieval)< and navigation systems within websites…

Categorization – taxonomy – hierarchical structure. A site can have more than one. Based on a controlled vocabulary – SEOs can work on that. Provides guidelines, but is not navigation design. Nav design emerges FROM this.

Headings are navigation labels – Link labels are navigation labels.

How should information be organized? NOT by keywords! User task or process, or what stage someone is in a process, topical focus, target audience, alphabetical…

The vocabulary is very different for a patient than it is for a medical professional. Two very different user goals.

Taxonomy by Type: Mayo Clinic is a great example. National Cancer Institute is another. File type is one way the Mayo Clinic organizes content.

When a site is very big alphabetical can be helpful taxonomy.

Navigation labels should be unique, distinguishable, scannable. If links aren’t distinguishable, it leads to pogo-sticking – jumping back and forth between pages and they won’t convert.

WTF – when considering usability, like seeing a footer filled with keyword stuffed links, if you say or hear WTF? it’s not scannable.

Not all navigational elements need keywords.

Embedded text links – if purely keyword stuffed, it causes pogo-sticking.

If a page is not scannable, credibility goes down.

Not everything can be a priority. If you have too many links, content is less findable, yet it’s also less findable if not enough links exist.

Navigation label order is important. If Home is first, then About Us is next, that’s not helping the user who typically wants to know “can you help me”.

SEOs confuse architecture and construction as the same thing. You end up with the mental model of an SEO or a tech team, not the mental model of the user. Users will abandon your site.

Mental Models

An explanation of a person’s thought process. You see on, you press the button, the light goes on. You see off, you press the button, the light goes off.

The tech team’s notion of a how a site works makes sense to them. It’s based on THEIR mental model.

The closer you can get these to match, the better your site will be. The more conversions, the better ROI, the better searcher experience. SEOs go bonkers with keywords. If you confuse users, it’s not good for them or the search engines.

Determine mental models by talking to people. Watch them in their natural environment. Show people a web page, watch their performance. Ask them – what do you expect if you go to this page? They’ll tell you THEIR keywords that would describe the content.

Testing is critical to successful Information Architecture.

Closed card sort tests help you to learn the users’ mental model.

Common IA Mistakes

Not watching people actually watching your site. What’s happening? Why are they doing what they’re doing?

If you don’t do usability testing, you’re forcing your mental model on users.

During tests you have to be VERY careful about not asking leading questions- you can’t put YOUR keywords into the questions.

Imitating other site architecture is one of the biggest mistakes. Just because it’s out there, doesn’t mean it’s the right IA to base your site’s IA on.

Critical Tasks:

TEST TEST TEST

Do your research…

Remember SEO is not optimizing for search engines, it’s optimizing for PEOPLE.

Eleanor is up next.

I’m here to talk about the challenges of media sites.

When you’re dealing with large organizations, you’re dealing with everyone who’s got some investment in the site. That’s not necessarily good for Information Architecture. In-house, we recognize users want to get to some piece of content – they need to find relevance through navigation or IA.

Taxonomy and site maps are important. Media organizations need to refresh and evaluate as time goes by. What worked in 1998 may not apply today.

Each department will push their own agenda in a large organization. each department has their own focus groups. This can cause problems when they clash across multiple departments.

You need to get to the skeleton of the site and fix that before you move resources across the site. I find myself becoming the referee or go-between.

Company owners can know that SEO offers value but they don’t know what that means. As an in-house SEO you need to address communicating value and why a site needs to look a certain way from an Information Architecture perspective.

Challenges I face – “Home” is actually five different landing pages. Multiple “sites” exist within the main ABC News site. A lot of network sites have this problem.

So navigation is the start but it does not entirely define Information Architecture. There’s a strong hand in Corporate that says “people want Good Morning America” – others might say “Good Morning America is part of the bigger site”. Conflicting views come up.

Content Types

I tell people in-house and editorial – does the user know where they’re at? Do they know where to go? Pogo-sticking is a concern. It also affects search rankings.

In 1 example, an exclusive on American hikers detained in Iran becoming engaged, that story ended up in Good Morning America’s section, and the Parenting sub-section within that. Which makes no sense. But marketing had a hand in determining that. The story had nothing to do with parenting, and when I tested and moved the story out of that sub-section, it ranked higher in the search engines.

We have to prioritize in-house what’s important and what isn’t. Another example is Blogs, which can be hard to find if they’re buried within the main media site.

Keywords

Most SEO consultants will help you index for evergreen terms. Daily (trending) terms are not going to succeed if your site’s taxonomy hasn’t been worked out. It’s harder to rank for shorter term trending terms without the structure in place to support it or the Information Architecture well thought out.

Takeaways:

Organize the content and label it in a way users can find.

Align site’s business, marketing and content goals. Design and SEO can support taxonomy and prioritization.

Sub-domains aren’t the solution! Marketing goals and other goals within the organization can cause these problems to arise.

Q & A

Q- People know how to search to find information. People are finding information more through social channels. They’re finding it, then going back to their social channel for the next information to discover. Have you found a way with Information Architecture to address stickiness?

Shari – No. That’s “Quick fact” type findability. Where is something? How do I get there? This is “information scent”. If information scent is strong, that can help because people want to read more than one page if they’re looking for information. Health related content is a good example. In Social Media, I don’t see people just looking at one page unless it’s a quick fact.

Q- Have you ever worked with faceted classification navigation?

Shari – no – that leads to duplicate content. It’s not based on prioritization. There’s a time and place for it so you need to know where and when to use it.

Reserve it for advanced search, learn how to prioritize, and learn how to eliminate duplicate content issues.

Q – In Germany we see a lot of mega-dropdown menus what do you think of them?

Shari – people don’t like them. Especially in Germany. If you put too many links on a page, that’s a problem. Dropdown menus are too many links. If you’re a good programmer you can eliminate them and if needed, put them back quickly.

Prioritizing what’s on the menu is better. (YES! HOMERUN Answer).

Q – Home pages – when you have multiple home pages within the site, what is the approach to that top level home page?

Shari – Clear Labeling. If it’s the Good Morning America home page, call it the GMA home Page. Let people know what the page’s focus is. When you provide clear navigation labels, you’re helping orientation and helping people complete tasks.

Something as a clearly labeled breadcrumb links will make a tremendous difference.

Well people I have to run to my next session so I’m out of here. Great information!

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