Updates from SESLondon 2013

Recently Search Engine Watch and ClickZ  hosted the 14th annual SES London. This was conducted from Feb 18th to Feb 21 2013.

SES London 2013

They were Covering the latest trends and challenges facing the online marketing industry, SES London provides guidance from leading experts on Search, Social Media, Display, Mobile, Email and more.

Have a detailed look at the articles written about the SES London 2013 below:

• SEO & Website Migrations: How to Have a Smooth Transition – #seslon
• B2B Video Marketing – #seslon
• Future Forward – Shifts in the Digital Revolution – #seslon
• Web Analytics Deep Dive #SESLON
• Building the Anti-Fragile SEM Strategy #SESLON
• Targeting With Mobile Search #SESLON
• Integrated Marketing: What Does That Really Mean? #SESLON
• Optimising Humans! The Art of Data-Driven Social Marketing #SESLON
• Activating the Social-Search Dynamic #SESLON
• Content-Driven SEO on a Shoestring #SESLON
• Remarketing/Retargeting Done Right… & Wrong #SESLON
• Maximising Realtime Marketing Opportunities #SESLON
• How to Earn Visibility & Links Through Killer Content Strategy #seslon #seslondon
• Keyword Modelling Analysis with Bill Hunt #seslondon #seslon
• Link Building in a Post Penguin World #seslon #seslondon
• Play SES Bingo!

Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Are you wondering how your peers are using social media? Wondering if you should focus on Google+ or Pinterest?

Download the report here

Source: Social Media Examiner

Three Phases of Social Optimization

Onsite Optimization – Social Buttons are CTA Buttons

Why do it?

Why should you care about where your social buttons show up? For the same reason you care where you place your buy button on your landing pages; optimal button placement leads to higher conversions, whether the conversion in question is a fresh share of your blog content or product page, or a new Facebook Fan or LinkedIn group member.

In this sense, social buttons need to be viewed as calls to action. Find places on your pages that are the most visible and drop your social buttons there. What works best for your readers? Scrolling sidebar? Above and below the posts? All of the social buttons or just a select few? Test it and find out.

How to do it:

There are several ways to go about testing your social button placement. I’ll suggest a few here for you to start with, but feel free to expand and investigate alternate methods. If you find any good ones, let me know in the comments!

• Use heat/click maps to see where your visitors click. Use a service like CrazyEgg to see where your visitors are lingering on a page and then place your social buttons accordingly. Once you’ve got your buttons in a spot that you think will convert well, run another click map to make sure you’re getting the focus on those buttons!
• Just because the new button placement worked on a blog post doesn’t mean that it will work on a product page. Test your button placement and track the social action over a number of new posts and pages to see which works best.
• Get creative with your social button placement. If you find that it converts best in the top-left corner, try putting the buttons in a scrolling sidebar. Or, if above/below the posts works best, make it a scrolling footer or header. Do users click social buttons at the bottom of posts rather than the top? Have your buttons pop up in a dynamic window once they scroll past a certain point in the post.
• As always, only put social buttons where they make sense; you don’t want to pull people away from the final steps in your checkout process so they can look at your Facebook page. Buttons that allow you to share should be placed in locations that will attract more visitors: product pages, blog posts, the homepage, testimonial pages, etc. As a general rule, the further down the marketing funnel you go (IE: the closer you are to a conversion), the less you want to include social buttons.

While you’re testing your button placement, be sure you’re adhering to basic A/B testing practices. Don’t put too many social buttons on your site. For me, I’ve found that placing three key sharing locations works best for me. It’s like the holy trinity of social sharing.

But don’t take my experience as law; test your site and see which works best for you. If you overload your page with social buttons, your conversion rate will drop significantly. As a general rule, don’t put social buttons on your page for networks that you yourself are not active in. If someone shares your article on Orkut, you’ll never know and you won’t be able to engage with them.

2. Profile Optimization – Your Profile is a Landing Page

Why do it?

Your profile is how people find you. Several social tools making their way onto the scene are mining your profile to find topics you’re influential on, for example, Followerwonk. Examples of people who have increased their fans or followers abound. Rand Fishkin, well-known co-founder of SEOmoz, increased his Twitter follower accrual rate by just changing his profile picture.

Beyond the profile picture, your bio and description are critical to attracting new fans and followers. Whether it’s your Twitter bio, your Facebook fan page description, or your LinkedIn group’s description, you’ve got to make sure your description attracts new people. Optimizing your profile increases the likelihood that you show up higher in the search engines for the keyword you’re targeting (as should be obvious for anyone working in SEO). If your potential follower finds you through Twitter’s proprietary search engine or a fan runs a basic Google search to find sites in your niche, having a profile that is optimized for the correct keywords will help you show up higher in the results. Easily identifiable interests in your profile attract targeted followers.

How to do it:

First, before you can gather any quantifiable results, you’ve got to establish a baseline. Monitor your profile’s performance for at least two weeks and tally your follower/fan/member accrual rate. Now try modifying your profile (changing logo, profile pic, etc). Do keyword research, just like you would for any other piece of content you’re trying to promote on the web. Monitor your accrual rate for another two weeks. Repeat ad nauseum.

A sure way to alienate potential followers or fans is to stuff your bio full of strong and identifiable keywords. Limit yourself to two or three that describe what you do, what you share on, and what they can expect to see. Steer clear of overused phrases like “[subject] ninja/guru/expert” in your bio. Tell your fans what you do and allow them to decide how good you are at it. This may be more subjective than the other points here but hey, test it and see what works best for you!

3. Sharing Optimization – Sharing Content IS Content

Why do it?

Knowing when to say something is as important as knowing what to say. Sharing your best content when none of your followers are online to see it is just as useless as throwing spam to a crowd of followers. Using tools that identify when your followers are most commonly online and optimizing the time at which you share your content can increase conversion, reshare and retweet rates.

How to do it:

There are several tools out in the wide world of social analytics that can help you identify when to share to get the most impressions and reshares/retweets. Use tools like Tweriodand Crowdbooster to find out when your followers are online and tweet accordingly. You can schedule updates via apps like Timely and Buffer. If all else fails, you can simply post an update at the right time (crazy, right?).

For other metrics, like how well a share converts based on length of the update/share, employ some good, old-fashioned Excel data tracking. Rand Fishkin (again) found that, for him, shorter updates yielded higher clickthrough rates. What works best for you?

While you’re testing, though, be sure you don’t spam to test conversion rates. There’s no quicker way to lose followers and fans than to blast the link over and over in different formats. In the linked page above, a survey found that 66% of Twitter users would unfollow someone for spam sharing, and 58% would unfollow someone if they appeared automated. Space it out, get some friends to tweet variations of your message and see which does best. Automating your profile will also get people to block/unfollow you, so don’t completely automate your sharing.

The Four Cardinal Rules of Social Optimization

1. Social buttons should be viewed as call to action buttons, and just as important as getting a user to click a buy button.
2. A social profile is a landing page.
3. Sharing content IS content. Optimizing your content doesn’t stop when it’s published, you’ve got to make sure the copy associated with what your sharing works too.
4. As with all testing, you need significant traffic numbers to quantify significant results. Ideally, your testing pages should see a total of 1,000 visitors over the testing period to make any informed conclusion.

Credit:

Social Media Infographics

The explosion of social networking sites over the past decade has facilitated a transformation in the way we communicate with each other. Here we look at some of these communities with over 1 million users, both active and defunct:

Facebook’s World

Facebook is the most dominant brand in the world of social media. Ever wonder how? Click the image below to view a comprehensive infographic:

Age Distribution on Social Networking Sites

Here’s some interesting statistics regarding the age distribution across many of the popular social networking websites:

A HubSpotter’s Guide to the (Social Media) Galaxy

Learn how marketers should explore new frontiers of social media, the blogoshere and more:

Digg vs. Reddit — The Infographic

There has always been a form of healthy rivalry between Reddit and Digg, and its respective user bases. Click to find out more:

Average Age of a Facebook User? 38

The demographics of most of the social networking sites change quite frequently. Flowtown has compiled the latest statistics about general usage of social networking sites especially Facebook. The statistics show that the average age of a Facebook user is 38 and more interestingly about 61% of the Facebook users are above 38 in age:

How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media?

Have you ever wondered about the relationship between mobile phones and social media? The mobile web is growing at an exponential rate, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down:

Social Media Demographics: Who’s Using Which Sites?

Have you ever wondered which sites attract the most educated of social media users, or those that pull in the highest income? Below we map the demographics of the world’s most popular social media sites:

How Executives are Using Social Media

The infographics mentioned below show how executives and professionals are using social media to promote their business or goods and services. According to the infographic: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media sites used by the executives:

Facebook vs. Twitter — A Breakdown of 2010 Social Demographics

Let us take a look at a breakdown of 2010 social demographics between Facebook and Twitter:

Women and Social Media

The following is a graphic that takes a look at what sites women are using, as well as how much and why women are participating in social media:

Facebook vs. Twitter

Facebook was once the “contender” against MySpace. That didn’t last too long, but soon Twitter emerged as a pseudo-social-network-competitor-thingy to Facebook and the competition heated up again:

Social Media: A Cheat Sheet

Are you new to social media? Are you unsure about how to engage your audience via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the rest? Here’s a handy infographic that doubles as a roadmap of the social Web:

Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know

If you ever want to impress anyone with your knowledge of Facebook miscellanea, below is the ultimate cheat sheet in the form of a very large infographic. Enjoy!

The Social Media Effect

This Infographics is intended to show you how different components of social media are integrated with one another:

When Social Media Attacks!

What happens when communities don’t exactly behave the way we intended them to? Fighting and bickering is normal and actually healthy for communities. Click to find out more:

Google’s Social Media Timeline

Google hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to social media attempts. Long story:

Social Media Prisms

The prism shows the landscape of social media in Germany with all the relevant conversation channels:

Social Media Building

So much discussion in the SEO community today centers around social media because of its potential to drive traffic, increase awareness, and build links. Here we explore some ways that a business can leverage specific social sites to achieve departmental goals:

China’s Social Media Map

The major players in the U.S. social media world can be counted on one hand: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn. Not so in China, where the country’s 300 million online users have a panoply of popular social networks to choose from — and Facebook doesn’t even crack the top 10!

Twitter Perceptions of Google Buzz Over Time

Social media monitoring and analytics company Viralheat put together this graphic that shows the initial positive response to Google Buzz on Twitter, followed by shifts in opinion based on events in the developing privacy story:

The State of B2B Social Media Marketing

For a deeper look at the current state of B2B social media marketing, check out the infographic below:

Are We Too Obsessed With Facebook?

Is Facebook an amazing connective medium? A plague that preys on the easily addicted? A little bit of both, or something else entirely?

The Meteoric Rise of Twitter

Twitter is one of among those brands and companies which have experienced such a fast growth. Click the image below to view the infographic:

Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy

Here is a short history of the controversies and missteps that have tarnished the social network’s otherwise meteoric success:

The Biggest Brands on Facebook

In this infographic, we explore the timeline of brand-friendly updates to Facebook itself, as well as the brands that dominate in Facebook marketing today:

Kevin Rose’s Digg

With over millions of users, Digg has become one of the most reputable force in the social media world that allows you to share your favorite stories online with your friends, co-workers and relatives:

The Current State of Twitter

There are some interesting hidden truths about Twitter and its users. The following graphic takes a look at Twitter’s path to 10 billion tweets, what we have learned about its users and what they’ve been talking about along the way:

Twitter on Paper

This infographic contains additional interesting facts about Twitter based on some numbers that co-founder Ev Williams announced at the Chirp conference:

What the Tweet?

Every day, thousands of stories are passed around the internet on blogs and via Twitter. Click here to find out more:

How are Companies Leveraging Social Media?

Ever wonder how big businesses are leveraging social media? Here is a graphic illustrating the most interesting of their findings:

The Rise of Facebook Mobile

Facebook is the number one app across most mobile operating systems. Flowtown.com took a look at the rise of Facebook mobile, and compiled a number of the most interesting facts and figures in the above graphic:

44% of Online Sharing Occurs Through Facebook

Impressively, 44% of shares occurred through Facebook in 2010, up 33% from last year. That number does not include shares done via Facebook’s “Like” button, which means the actual, universal percentage of shares through Facebook is likely higher:

Inside the Political Twittersphere

Ever wondered how politicians use Twitter? Who are the most active politicians on Twitter? Who do they follow, and who follows them? Who are the political strategists and media personalities that politicians follow? And within the political Twittersphere, who follows the most people, and who follows them?

Twitter Users Profile Infographic

Satire and the Internet make great friends. And the newest Internet sensation to be targeted is Twitter. While many blogs make fun of twitter you must admit Twitter does have a larger group of followers. Of course, how many are actually paying attention remains to be seen:

History of Social Media — History of Social Media Bookmarking

Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries:

Social Marketing Compass

A compass is a device for orientating oneself and guiding physical direction. The social marketing compass points a brand in a physical and experimental direction, allowing them to connect with their customers, peers, and influencers, where those users already interact and seek guidance online:

Social Web Involvement

This map demonstrates the social web involvement of the users worldwide. It provides you a clear picture that every month hundreds of millions of web users create and share their content with one another. This map shows the active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo up-loaders and micro-bloggers:

The Biggest Shift

The Biggest Shift tells the significance and extent of social media network. If you are keen to utilize word of mouth advertising, social media is there to assist to place heighten your works at all. With focusing your marketing interest to the top social networking websites, you will see the instant results of your efforts:

How People Share Content On The Web

This infographic will show that how people share pieces of contents on the web and how facebook dominates social media:

Top 10 Ways to Effectively Use Social Media

There is no doubt that social media is a vital component in internet marketing, visibility, and branding. However, when done incorrectly, it can actually become detrimental to your company. Here are my top ten ways to use social media effectively.

1. Identify Your Purpose – Your social media strategy should be a stand-alone plan which requires nothing else to sustain it. Your plan should not aspire to improve your search engine rankings, as there aren’t usually many backlinks that come from it. Approach your social media strategy as if there were no such thing as search engines. Some things you may want to consider in identifying your purpose include:

• Branding – Start building a strong brand for your company!
• Exposure – Give your company and website some visibility!
• Networking – Get involved in the community and make connections!
• Relationship/Trust Building – Potential clients are more likely to become actual clients when they have a relationship with you and know they can trust you!
• Customer Relations – Use social media to build good, solid customer relations!

2. Fresh, Consistent, Relevant Content – Make sure there is a high level of consistency in the content you share on social media sites. Consistency is important regarding frequent updates (fresh content), as well as in keeping with the purpose of your social media strategy. Consistency in your message and your branding also establishes relevance for SEO purposes.

For instance, if you are a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Consultant, provide quality tips on SEM and internet marketing, as well as useful articles, resources, and links. Try to link to (connect/contact/friend/follow) other members in your industry or similar industries, like search engine optimization (SEO) or network marketing.

This can assist you in achieving your branding ambitions and enable you to engineer your own company’s brand recognition. This offers you some control over how you and your company are perceived. Your social media presence can help strengthen your company’s webutation (web reputation). Your online friends, business contacts, and “followers” should be able to give a brief description of what your company does. If they cannot, you may want to reevaluate #1 and reexamine the content you’re sharing.

3. Concentrate on Content, Not Marketing – All too often, people go about this the other way around. Allow your content to do the marketing for you by focusing on valuable, consistent, relevant content.

Digging, liking, bookmarking, etc. your own content can actually damage your credibility. It is better to write compelling content that your readers will give an unsolicited digg, like, or bookmark.  When people like what you’re saying, they will share it! When they do, search engines will notice, so write something noteworthy and let the rest happen organically!

4. Be a Valuable Asset – When you think of social media, place the emphasis on “social”. It is not called self-promotional media for a reason. Always keep that in mind when considering what to share on your social media sites.

Posting nothing but self-promotional links, information, and requests will inevitably make you a part of the social media noise, and you will eventually be filtered out. Worse yet, you could be regarded as a “spammer”, which is the fastest way for your webutation to take a downward turn. You may not lose friends, contacts, or “followers’ over it, however, they will begin to skim your posts without even realizing it, or they may ignore you altogether.

You can avoid this by becoming a valuable asset in your niche. One example of how to do this is by posting links to resources and domains that are not your own. This does not mean to post links to your social media profiles, your own squidoo lenses, etc. This means do not post any domains with which you are associated. You can; however, occasionally post links to your own site. Just be sure that you don’t do it so often that it becomes noise or spam.

Believe it or not, you should attempt to befriend your competitors and even promote them. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but interlinking and networking are very powerful tools!

5. The Client Always Comes First – Now that you’ve identified your purpose, contemplate what your client (or ideal visitor) is searching for. (Write for the audience you want.) Imagine your ideal, potential client distinctly in your mind, and consider what they may be perceiving through the information that you share. You want to make a good first impression on them, as they are the ones you want to attract to your site.

6. Get Involved and Build a Rapport – Participating in discussions, replying to forums and blogs, and asking for feedback (and responding to it) are all exceptional ways to get involved in the community and build a rapport with other members. This allows people to view you as a real person, instead of a robot that does nothing but post links repeatedly. (If you’re going to post links, ensure their relevance.) Other people will warm up to you and be more likely to become a friend or contact if you humanize yourself. Social media sites provide you the opportunity to show your personality, so use them in order to truly connect with your target market.

7. Warning! Do Not Over Optimize – Of course you desire top search engine rankings for your specific keywords, but tread lightly here. It is possible to over optimize. If you use the same anchor text on every site you link to, your site will leave what is referred to as a “digital footprint”, which can be a sign that you may be trying to exploit or manipulate search engine results.

In order to refrain from this, use natural alterations in your anchor text for the links which point to your original site. A certain amount of “click here” (or similar links) are necessary to balance your optimization strategy.

8. Start Linking to Your “Deep Links” – Everyone wants to link their public profiles to their (main) homepage, but deep links (or links that point to internal pages on your site or blog) provide depth and authority. Let’s assume that there are two identical websites. The one that has accumulated more deep links will always outrank the other. This method will also gain more exposure for your site in search engine results because your internal pages will begin to rank for relevant keywords and key-phrases.

Deep Links Tip: You may not want to share the link to your homepage with someone you meet on a business network or social media site. Think about linking to your “About Me” page (if applicable) in order to give a more personal introduction to your site, or try linking to your “Company” or “Services” page (if applicable) to give your visitor an overview of what your company does.

9. Link Deliberately with No Apologies – When someone “friends” you, follows you, or subscribes to your blog and/or updates on social sites, it is because they are interested in your most recent information, news, tips, resources, etc. If they should discover that they are not interested, they will simply stop following you, which is not a big deal. This is not a “popularity” contest (regardless of what some people may think), as the “quality” of your “followers” is what matters, not the quantity of them! This is a way to syndicate and socialize with like-minded individuals in a professional and personable setting.

As with anything else, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about hyperlinking to content and resources on social media websites. Here is the wrong way: “Read my blog!” or “Check out my site!” The correct way is achieved by sharing a helpful link (it can be your own, or something else of interest to your audience) and encourage a discussion about it. For example, if you are a SEO specialist, you could share a link to a Google article about their latest SEO standards and ask for your readers’ opinions on it. Since most of them will be in your field or a related field, the article should be of interest to them which should inspire some discussion.

10. Utilize Social Networking – In order to genuinely accomplish a successful social media strategy, you should engage in social networking, as well. Replace the word “competitor” with “colleague” in your social media vocabulary. Other webmasters, companies, consultants, and individuals in your niche are your allies in the brave new world of social media!

Make it a goal to locate as many of your competitors (who are on your level or within an acceptable range) and develop a cadre or key group of professionals, friends, and/or business contacts. These are people you can share with, exchange links with, and even embark on joint ventures with. Don’t view them as your competition anymore. Start exploring ways to leverage one another’s positions in the marketplace!

Source:Danielle Dandridge

Site Navigation & Information Architecture Fundamentals For SEOs

One of the most confusing skills to teach someone who practices organic search engine optimization is called “information architecture” (aka “IA”). I’ve given several talks on the topic in an effort to chip away at some popular misconceptions. Each time the audience has people who refer to themselves as an SEO, IA or usability professional. Typically we’re allotted anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to discuss “successful information architecture.” Since IA is not the same for SEO and Usability (closely related however), conveying the nuances of how, why, when, where and what information architecture is to each profession feels like a disaster.

Adding to the frustration of communicating what IA is and what it’s for are terms like “mental model,” “taxonomy,” “ontology,” “wayfinder” and many more. If I were to list all the pieces of the information architecture puzzle here, it would take up too much space.

It’s easy to think that IA is all about navigation or even is navigation. It’s not navigation if you think of navigation as offering directions to get from one place to another place. Rather, it’s offering directions in a manner that depends on who or what is asking for them.

For this article, I’m going to focus on information architecture as it is used by someone who optimizes web site pages for search engines. You’ll see the connections to the usability side but the methodology I want to cover now is for the SEO.

Navigation

The screen shot below is of a real web site. What you see is the navigation scheme for the entire website. There are no drop down categories if you click on a sphere.

The internet is rife with websites with sitewide navigation using the words “about,” “services,” “solutions” and “contact.” Sadly, many of them have an SEO assigned to work on them and despite all their keyword and linking work, they ignore the words used to navigate the site. For this site, each sphere links to one page, with no categories. To learn what “solutions” are, one page explains it if you click to read it. (Just love the incentive to go do that!)

The easiest step for an SEO to correct this is to add a keyword to each link label. The most obvious choices would be the brand, specific types of services (consulting, accounting, job finding) and identifying “solutions” (or finding a more definitive word). An SEO skilled in information architecture will take it deeper. This person will want to know what the “mental model” is before picking out any keywords.

Mental model

“Mental models” represent people. And people have brains. Because they have brains, they have information and behaviors stored in their heads. We know humans are creatures of habit and many dislike change. They use commonly known words to describe different things. They’re young or old. Some are deaf. Some wear reading glasses. Maybe they can’t spell. Maybe they only get online when they’re drunk or when they can get to a public library.

Without an idea of who the people are that are expected to use a website, plain vanilla link labels like “about” and “services” are the uninspired standard. But with some mental model data, an SEO can add more zest to their keyword research. I understand that an SEO is often one of the last people to have input on page content during development. This is not a wise practice. For an SEO to create more powerful information architecture for a site, they need to know:

• Who is intended to use the site?
• How they conduct tasks?
• What do they need?
• Variables? Environment, disabilities, age, time, computer experience
• How do they think? Behave?
• User personas
• Card sorting
• User testing during prototype stage
• Analytics
• Market research
• Brain research (neurosciences)
• Human behavior

Why?

Let’s take a moment to consider first-time parents and grandparents searching for baby items. They may want to browse online inside a famous department store. When they land on the homepage, they find confusing navigation. It’s frustrating them because the navigation was laid out without regard to research into the habits and needs of customers. If you were an English speaking person taking a visitor from Japan on a tour of your home, wouldn’t it help to know their language and customs first?

In the example below, there is left sidebar navigation and another drop down menu that appears with the search function. The drop down menu offers redundant or similar link labels as the left side navigation. Which “baby” link do we choose? If you’re looking for a baby gift, do you look under “baby” or “gifts?” For clothes, would you think to try “apparel” or still stick with “baby?” What’s the purpose of the “entire site” drop down menu? Isn’t it adding confusion to the overall user experience?

An SEO might want to add expertise here. Perhaps “clothing” is more commonly used by the site’s customers than “apparel.” Are “baby gifts” something that could be put together rather than in separate categories? What if keyword research strongly suggests those two words are often searched on together?

Mechanics, IA & SEO

Information architecture for an SEO also requires getting into the mechanics of a web site. Consider a site that uses AJAX technology. The URL doesn’t change on AJAX pages. How does this effect IA?

Today, most people understand they can tell the hierarchy (directory structure) of a site by looking at a page’s URL (domain.com/directory/page.html). If that URL never changes, they’re denied this information. And of course, if they bookmark it, they’ll never know what page they bookmarked because it has no accurate identifier.

Text links still rule search engine crawlability. Therefore, an SEO must work out issues with JavaScript and image-based navigation. Link consistency is another area of focus. If a link within content points to a link in global navigation, they should be using the same terms. Navigation, from an SEO perspective, is not simply a matter of creating keyword rich categories or classes for products. What’s happening in the background ties in too, such as sitemap creation, robots exclusions, types of navigation (footer, global, side bar, breadcrumb, etc.), error page handling, internal linking and more.

The key to understanding where the mechanics fit in is to understand and rely on your mental model (who is using the site). An SEO is working on the search engine side, but search engines are dependent on user behavior.

Taxonomies & ontologies

Alan Bleiweiss did a great job working out navigation layouts with categories and sub-categories in Information Architecture – Rocket Science Simplified. He created graphics of example navigation schemes so that readers could visualize relationships, categories and classifications of terms.

“Taxonomy” refers to classification such as categories. “Ontology” means the relationships between classifications or terms. For example, a fruit basket is the classification. Apples, oranges, peaches and mangoes would be related to this classification. If a stakeholder requests that you put “car” into a fruit basket category, it’s unrelated and they need their head examined.

Another example for a taxonomy setup would be:

• Category – Music
• Subcategory – Rock
• Related terms – soft rock, hard rock, etc.

Web sites with enormous inventories face situations where relationships can overlap. Unless the information architecture is worked out beforehand, they end up with orphan pages or hubs (sections with levels) that are completely disconnected from related categories or sub-categories. Before navigation can offer a sense of place, it has to be soundly researched for link relationships, user connections based on user behavior (i.e. baby gifts, baby or gifts), mapped out and coded in the back-end. It’s not difficult to see how important sense of place might be for site visitors, but it’s just as important for search engines. A well designed IA allows search engines to link directly to top level pages that it learns are popular with searchers.

Context, organization and findability

An SEO works with content, whether writing it, creating link labels or linking between pages. While many stop at keyword research, the more skilled will evaluate context issues such whether the site is local or global, what language(s) are used and what terminology choices are the best. An information architect will determine the overall interlinking structure with the goal of creating confidence for both search engines and site visitors by establishing hierarchy and orientation via navigation. Organized page content creation consists of where it goes, how much, order of importance, what goes in and why.

“Findability,” which is another fancy word you may see tossed about, is simply how to make pages easy to search for. Short tail and long tail keyword usage factor into findability. Keep in mind that much of the clues to a fortified site IA are found in mental model research. And best of all, if something isn’t converting as desired it can be examined and changed because user and searcher mental model information is available.

95% of all search engine referrals come from page one of search results pages (SERPS). Organic marketing has been viewed as the “easy” way to market web pages. Some will insist that paying for ads and placement in SERPS is the only way to go. It’s costly and to me, not that challenging. Information architecture is more of a voyage into the art of information communication. Before one syllable of text can be found by either an intended search engine bot or a human person via navigation, we study what they want to know and how they want to find it.

Source: SearchEngineLand