SEO & IA
a findability challenge
Alberto Mucignat
Italian IA Summit 2007

Information Architecture (IA)
The art and science of
organizing and
labeling web site to
support usability and
findability

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The art and science
of making webpages
attractive to the
search engines

What about you?

Elements

The common field
Findability is a goal of IA
-Wikipedia

Typical SEO/IA informations
keywords
markup
titles links
urls
contents
meta info
labels

Challenge

Make it easy
Design for the
people and, most
of the time, you’ll
keep the robots
happy!
-UserEffect.com

Where does it all start?
?

Where does it all start?

Google rule #1
Search engine is the real site
homepage
-David Weinberger

Google rule #2
>90% of search engine traffic is
directed to secondary pages

Old paradigma
Page #1
Page #2
Search
HP
engine
Page #n

New paradigma
Page #1
Page #2
Search
HP
engine
Page #n

Homepage is dead

Hierarchy
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

Linked hierarchy
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

Circularity
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

Findability
http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

Every page is a main page

we can apply to
every entry page
the same rules
we used for the
homepage

A SEO & IA Framework

Berrypicking model

From Analytics to Structure

Find important pages groups

Discover pages groups info

Define SERP elements

Context of search

Context of search
Avoid unexpected contents

Carefully define page items

Give more
http://www.youtube.com

No more dead roads

But...
the real
paradigma...

Users come from several sources
Search engine
Aggregator
WEBSITE
Mail
Direct links

Contents’ spreading
Newsletter
RSS Feed
WEBSITE Widgets
Players

Designing the inside out
Originally by Are Halland
http://www.slideshare.net/aregh/core-and-paths-designing-findability-from-
the-inside-and-out

Web 5.0

Thank you!
Alberto Mucignat
alberto.mucignat@gmail.com
skype: alberto.mucignat
http://www.mucignat.com