what seo might bring to information architecture

What SEO brings toInformation Architecture

Justin TauberJudd Garratt

October 2010

What about SEO?

b) If those ham-fisted SEOs touch my labels, I'll personally organise a denial of service attack for launch.

c) That's a marketing problem.

a) If Google can't find what it's looking for in this site,then there's something wrong with Google. The site is correct.

You say:

A new hope

To relinquish all control of SEO amounts to:a) Giving up control of how user expectations of the site are set

b) Ignoring the linguistic context of the labelling of the site

Google Site

SEO IA

Lost Found

Site

Journey

IA & SEO

Google

Am I in the right place?

Google Site

IA & SEO

Journey Journey

To relinquish all control of SEO amounts to:a) Giving up control of how user expectations of the site are set

b) Ignoring the linguistic context of the labelling of the site

Google

Your SiteJourney

Other Site

Other Site

Other Site

Journey

Journey

JourneyJourney

You can’t ignorelanguage

What aboutcard sorts?

Card sorts give you

concepts

Keyword analysis gives you

expressions

Empirically validatethe language usedin your IA

There’s no perfect label, but perfect labels

Keywords diversify your information scent

Help people feel that they’re in the right place

What you can do

1. Brief SEO with your taskanalysis and personas

1. Brief SEO with your taskanalysis and personas

2. Test the topicality of yourlabels in Google

3. Get action labels from SEO data

Some labels don't just represent buckets of

content, they are calls to action e.g. join, sign

up, purchase, etc

What terms are used by users who complete

a task

How do people actually describe these actions?

4. Be part of the decision to create new content

for SEO purposes

5. Ensure new contentfits within the users’

mental modelcards sorts and/or

tree analysis

It doesn’thave to be hard

Justin Tauber Judd Garratt

Image credits:1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/14014660@N03/3696386615/ 2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/iandesign/1205496024/3. http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/1273786384. http://www.flickr.com/photos/67478164@N00/3154516530/5. -

6. -7. http://www.flickr.com/photos/49462908@N00/3951143570/8. -

9. -10. -11. -12. http://www.flickr.com/photos/67478164@N00/3154516530/13. -

14. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdf/3298367999/15. http://www.flickr.com/photos/beth19/4774225069/16. http://www.flickr.com/photos/12568962@N00/2252118555/17. http://www.flickr.com/photos/bflv/4016893384/

18. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mendhak/4850482798/19. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonhurd/1506968422/20. -21. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonhurd/1506968422/22. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonhurd/1506969156/23. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonhurd/1506110501/24. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/3732851541/25. http://www.flickr.com/photos/42202689@N00/2517036416/ 26. http://www.flickr.com/photos/playingwithpsp/3026744920/