Site Architecture Best Practices for Search Findability - Adam Audette

Adam Audette, President
AudetteMedia
Site Architecture Best Practices for Search Findability

What is Information Architecture?
Many Different Applications of IA
Touches User Experience, Design, SEO, etc.
Can Strongly Influence Spidering
Complex Topic

Search Engine Dominance
65.5% of users start with a search engine (Enquiro 2007)
Google dominating search engine usage (61%+)

A Salient Quote:
“ We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” - Winston Churchill

Information Architecture (IA)
IA is the most essential factor influencing search spidering, indexing, and ranking.
IA encompasses labeling and navigation
IA is directly related to usability and conversion optimization.

What Will You Learn?
Findability fundamental to project goals
Allows users to find sites and sections w/in them easily
Attracts targeted visitors
Makes the site more navigable and easier to use
Helps Googlebot and other spiders traverse the site

What is Information Architecture?
1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within web sites and intranets.
3. The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability.
4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Peter Morville
Father of information architecture
Proponent of Findability

A Simple Definition
Information architecture is the semantic structure and organization of digital inventories.

What is Findability?
A better term than search engine optimization (SEO)
Puts the user in the mix
Describes a site that is easy to find in search engines
A site that is easy to navigate
A site that has content organized intuitively

The Balance of Bots and Users
The user is often left out in SEO
Findability is less myopic than SEO
Findability and IA part of every aspect of web production

People Matter
Who do we create sites for?
We don’t create sites for search engines, we create sites for people.
Balancing the needs of a spider with the needs of your visitor is a critical distinction.

Pieces of the IA Puzzle 1. Domains 2. Sections 3. Categories 4. Pages 5. Media

Domains
Keep URLs as short as possible (within reason)
Use hyphens to separate fields
Never use spaces, quotes, ampersands or other bad ascii characters
URLs are the foundation for crawling and indexing
Keep session IDs in URL to minimum (2 max)

http://www.mccormickandschmicks.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=content.display&pageID=2
http://crabplace.com/recipe_search.asp?Page=1&SearchString=Crab%20Salads&cat=1
http://crabplace.com/recipes/crab-salad

Apache mod_rewrite
Common Canonical Homepage Issue
http://www.mysite.com
http://mysite.com
http://www.mysite.com/index.html
http://mysite.com/index.html
When You Want Only
http://www.mysite.com /

Domains (con’t)
Canonicalization concerns
Set association in Google Webmaster Tools
Rewrite rule so preferred domain redirects

Apache Rewrite
301 Redirect for Apache
Write to ﬁle called ‘.htaccess’.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Redirect http://mysite.com to http://
www.mysite.com . Affects entire domain.

IIS (ASP) Rewrite
Use ISAPI: http://www.isapirewrite.com /

Permanent (301) Redirects
Always use 301 redirects
Redirect permanent /old http://www.newdomain.com/new

Crawling & Diagnostics Tools
Monitor site in Google Webmaster Tools console
Use other tools for diagnostics
Xenu (free): http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Web Link Validator (paid): http://www.relsoftware.com/wlv/

Redirects
Strive to use 301 permanent redirects where possible
302 (temporary) redirects do not pass PageRank
And that brings up PageRank™

PageRank™
Fundamental to Google’s ranking algorithm
Misused and misunderstood
Visible and invisible
Read more: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Sections and Categories
Entry points into deeper content
Hubs for users to find their way (waypoints)
Orient users and crawlers with breadcrumbs

Sections and Categories
Bridge shallow pages/root domain
High importance in internal linking
Label them with relevant terms

Basics of Site Architecture

Keyword Tools
Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Site Analytics (useful for site search too)
Apply keywords to critical areas
Title tag
Meta data (description for snippet)
Cross links
Page headers and content

Pages
Standards-compliant code
Semantic structure
Title tags under 70 characters
Descriptions under 155 characters
Relevant, focused, keywords used
Accurate header tags
Use of bulleted, numbered lists
Bolding for emphasis (with <strong>)

Pages
Meta keyword tag
May be used by Yahoo!
Totally abused and nearly worthless
Add 3-4 keyword modifiers here
Is often misused
When in doubt, remove it!

Pages
Aim for W3C standards-compliant code
Search engines like accessibility too: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/tips-for-making-information-universally.html
Alternate text attributes
Keep code external
js files in includes
CSS external
Header tags (h1, h2, etc) should reinforce title tags and body content

Internal Linking
Main index page is entry point
Passes most value
Use plain text links with relevant keywords
Create HTML sitemaps (link from each page)
Ensure sitemap link is above link threshold
Shallow pages indicate importance
Deep pages indicate lesser importance

Internal Linking
Deep linking from home page
Where possible and visitor-centric
Anchor text matters
Link to pages with relevant link text
Never use rel=nofollow on internal links
An SEO technique
Link Thresholds

Final Considerations
Relevant keywords in file names
Where possible and visitor-centric
XML Sitemaps
Excellent for control over crawling
Add directive to robots.txt
Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

XML Sitemap Syntax
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=’UTF-8’?>
<urlset xmins=’ http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 ’>
<url>
<loc> http://www.mysite.com /</loc>
<lastmod>1987-05-25</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

XML Sitemap Locations
Default Locations Search Engines Look for Sitemaps
http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml.gz
http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.gz
Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com / for a free sitemap

Excluding Content
Exclude areas that can trap crawlers
Common Robot Traps
Input Forms
Excessive session IDs in URL
Pages Restricted by Cookies
Frames
Logins

Robots.txt Syntax
User-agent: *
Disallow: /account_private/
Disallow: /privateﬁle.html
User-agent: Googlebot/2.1
Disallow: /user_account.php

Robots.txt Syntax
Robots.txt recognizes wildcards
Disallow: /*?zv=*

Other Stuff
No ODP
Search engines use title/descriptions
Control your snippets
meta name=“robots” content=“noodp”
Never use meta tags like:
meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow”

Link Development
Internal Link Development
Relevant departments and services
External link development
Government branches
Partner organizations
Local non-profits

Internal Linking Consistency
Link to pages within site consistently
Use descriptive link text where possible
Aim to stay below link thresholds
Refrain from using rel=”nofollow” on internal links
Link to deep pages from shallow pages when possible
Cross link deep pages

Shallow and Deep Pages

Diagnostic Tools
Check server headers
wget -S http://www.mydomain.com/page.html
Live header status: http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/
Charles web proxy: http://www.charlesproxy.com/index.php
Wireshark: http://www.wireshark.org/

Diagnostic Tools
Web Development
Firebug: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
Developer Toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

More Reading:
http:// www.audettemedia.com/nagw
This presentation
Links and resources
Book list
My contact information

AudetteMedia www.audettemedia.com Founded in 1997. Managing over $4M in Media annually. Lead by Internet marketing pioneers . Active speakers at leading search marketing conferences. Featured in international articles and publications on SEO.

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