RIMC 2013: Site Architecture the Right Way – Shari Thurow #RIMC13
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RIMC 2013: Site Architecture the Right Way – Shari Thurow #RIMC13

21st March 2013
What are we going to cover?
  • SEO, architecture and user experience
SEO is not about just simply “optimising for search engines” but instead about optimising for people. You then ficus on technology. Technology centred design is generally counterproductive to project and business goals. So what do we do?
  • Organise content so its easy to find
  • Ensure access to desired content
  • Prevent access to undesirable content
  • SEO is not about algorithms

A good way to solve problems is to see the bigger picture. SEO does have a big picture. Keywords and labels. Architecture and design has a lot to do with information architecture. What is your archiving plan? Can people follow a consistent journey through your site? Navigational queries are important for mobile devices.
Architecture and SEO because it helps the searcher find what they need as efficiently as possible. Ste architecture is usually linked to a lot of technical jargon but again, its about focussing on the user for usability and findability. Information architects think about those two things but also about accessibiliity. Its obvious but people don’t always do it! Credibility is lost when not all users are consided. If credibility goes down, conversion is less likely never mind the risk of increasing exit rate. People abandon websites because they cant find what they want once in the website
People who search a query and enter your site will browse your site and IA is based about optimising at browsing experience. Navigation is key to organisation, categorisation, labelling and priotisation. Technical architecture is based around hardware and software for serving web content. IA affects appearance of rankings in SERPs. Sitelinks are a great example of this in action, which wins more page real estate. IA also affects conversion. Sitelinks offer more specific content options and make the user happier before they enter the site. IA help people complete their tasks
  • IA decisions have a clear impact on SEO
  • Organisations constantly ignore this fundamental issue
  • Content can be arranged by lots of categories but SEOs only determine IA by topics or subject via keywords. This should not be done, but by tasks, processes, target audience, type etc
  • Supplemental text links far more contextual such as see also pages
  • Be proactive, not reactive. Build a website that searchers want, not what search engines want
So what is user experience. Its about the user, not YOU and your opinion, Usability is about task completion. A user asks 3 things…
  1. Can I eat it?
  2. Can it eat me?
  3. Can I have sex with it?
Funnily enough this works the same way with websites.
How + Why = ROI

shari-thurowShari Thurow – Omni Marketing

Shari Thurow has been designing and promoting Web sites since 1995, and she is outsourced to many firms throughout the U.S. As a pioneer in the area of search-engine friendly Web site design, she has a 100% success rate for getting client sites ranked at the top of search engines and is the author of Search Engine Visibility. She also has experience in banner advertising, and posting to moderated discussion lists and newsgroups.

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Written By
Alex Moss is the Director at FireCask, an online marketing agency in Manchester specialising in Search, Content and WordPress development. Alex is also the Co-Founder of Peadig, a WordPress framework powered by Bootstrap.
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