Posts tagged Architecture
Want to Test Next-Gen Network Architecture that May Save Mobile Networks? Get an Android
Nov 24th
Have you heard of CCN? CCN is an open-source implementation of “content-centric networking” or more commonly “named data networking.” It’s a technology being actively developed by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), formerly Xerox PARC, the birthplace of computing mainstays like the PC, Ethernet, laser printing and the graphical user interface.
So what’s CCN? It’s an alternative idea about how computer networking should work – and it could very well one day be the future of Internet communications, most importantly, mobile networks.
Sponsor
If testing out experimental, next-generation network architecture is the kind of thing that gets you excited about technology, then you have to get an Android phone. PARC has just announced that Android is now a supported platform for CCN testers.
Why CCN is Needed
To find out more about CCN’s development, progress and potential, we spoke to PARC’s Jim Thornton, project manager for CCN, and Business Development lead, John Tripier. Below is a summary of what we learned.
IP, or the Internet Protocol, is the backbone of today’s Internet. When it was invented, it was created with the idea of computers talking to each other, sort of like a telephone system for computer networks. But that was many, many years ago, in a much different world. Although the invention of IP has led to major innovations in terms of communications, it no longer represents the best technology for how we use the Internet these days.
If you ask people what they think about the Internet, or how they use it, they’ll tell you about watching YouTube videos, socializing on Facebook, checking email, etc. A lot of what people do involves viewing and accessing content. IP allows you to make a request for that content by typing in a URL. The URL then resolves to an actual address on the Internet, that being the location of a physical server in a data center somewhere, connected to the Web. Of course, that’s a simple explanation – large sites have more than one server and more than a single IP address. But the concept is the same – the data travels from one endpoint to the other.
CCN, on the other hand, is an attempt to take what works about IP and modernize it for how we use the Internet now. Like IP, it too wants to introduce a simple way of asking for content. IP uses URLs, but CCN uses names. The difference is that with CCN, the content being requested doesn’t have to come from only the originating server – it can be housed on other nodes on the Internet. CCN will deliver the content from the node closest to you. This could be a router maintained by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), for example, which would be much closer – physically – than a server in a data farm thousands of miles away.
Not only is the distance between content requester and content storage closer, it would also lessen the congestion on the network as a whole. Instead of everybody hitting up a single site for a popular item – say, a YouTube video of an adorable kitten, for example – they would just pull from the nearest copy.
CCN on Mobile
Although CCN has multiple use cases – consumers, enterprise or mobile carriers could take advantage of CCN on their networks, it’s the mobile carrier application that’s of interest to us. Carriers have the greatest need for a solution like this, as we move into the new computing landscape where connected devices, smartphones, tablets and portable computers are the norm, and exist in greater number than the PC ever did.
The mobile carriers themselves are struggling to adapt, building out new network infrastructure, but not fast enough, it seems, to keep up with demand. Some have proposed measures to prioritize certain content streams over others, but this goes agains against one of the core principles Internet proponents hold dear: network neutrality. Google and Verizon, for example, reportedly teamed up to push lawmakers into allowing content creators to pay for prioritized content delivery. They later denied this was the case, but many are still skeptical, especially given the number of loopholes in their proposed plan.
The good news is that with respect to network neutrality, CCN is neutral. Carriers could avoid the traffic congestion that occurs around popular pieces of content, by allowing networks to move that content just once across the line, then serve it up to end users far downstream from the original source.
When Is This Coming?
CCN could one day roll out alongside or on top of IP – it wouldn’t have to be a case of either/or. For use on the Internet, all that’s needed is its integration into the routers and networking equipment that move data packets across the net. That’s no small thing, however. CCN is likely years and years away from real-world use. But clients testing PARC’s software solution, the open source technology hosted at CCNX.org, are just 18 months to 2 years from using it commercially.
We YouTube video viewers will have to wait a bit longer, unless Google were to get involved, for example. There are very few companies of Google’s size that could actually implement a technology like this on a large scale…which is why it’s interesting to see that PARC’s CCN software is now available for testing on Android devices. That wasn’t done at Google’s behest, mind you, it’s just that Android is based on Linux, and Linux is the OS of the Internet.
Dealing with traffic congestion isn’t CCN’s only advantage. It can also take advantage of any radio on a device to transfer bits, it has a robust security model in place involving cryptographic technology, it’s flexible, and, from an end user standpoint, it would be simple to use. Instead of having to practically become a network administrator to set up your home’s network, for instance, configuration would be much easier to manage and security would be built-in.
Researchers interested in exploring the possibilities of CCN on mobile can download the new code for use on Android devices, and then, as PARC says, “work on the bleeding edge of technology experimentation and adoption.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
On-Site Linking Architecture: Your Hidden SEO Goldmine (or Nemesis) – Part 1 – Search Engine Watch
Sep 29th
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On-Site Linking Architecture: Your Hidden SEO Goldmine (or Nemesis) – Part 1
Search Engine Watch Many major CMS providers have latched onto the fact that "SEO" is all the craze now, so they take great pains to voice their claim that their systems have … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Information Architecture – Stop Shooting For The Moon
Sep 7th
Our industry is chock full of advise about how the best approach is to go for phrases that aren’t necessarily the most competitive – to go for the lower hanging fruit. Concepts in this area usually emphasize the notion that if you have to choose between two phrases that you’ll optimize for, if you go for the one that has less actual search volume and less competition you’ll be doing your client justice, and you’ll make your job easier.
This way of thinking I put in the “if you shoot for the moon and fall short, you’ll end up among the stars” mentality. Which is actually an extremely inaccurate notion, and in the long haul, will do more harm than good. Instead, I say “Shoot for the farthest galaxy away – and if you fall short, you really will end up among the stars.”
The Shoot for the Moon Fallacy
Okay so let’s take that saying. It may be, on the surface, that this saying gives a lot of people great hope. Hope that if they reach way beyond earth-bound goals, even if you come up short, you’ll still end up way beyond. Except it’s bogus. It’s a hollow motivation. Because even if you make it to the moon, (let alone fall short), you’re still going to be 150 MILLION KILOMETERS short of even OUR Star, the Sun.
And if you fall short, you’re not going to be “among the stars”. You will, however, still be stuck in our solar system. Which honestly, is pretty much just like everyone else. And while you won’t be alone in your adventure, you will end up stuck in this little dust-ball in the corner of the galactic playing field.
Solar System SEO
So okay – now that I’ve corrected that bogus myth of a motivator, let’s look at how that equates to the common view that sites should be optimized for “less competitive” phrases. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t optimize at least some of your content for less competitive phrases. Especially when you’re dealing with a small, brand new site, with little content in a highly competitive market. In fact, you may actually need to start your efforts on those lower hanging targets.
Except if that’s all you ever do, you’re going to only get so far and no further. Which you might find acceptable. Or the site owner may seem ecstatic about. And that’s great, if it means more income generated through organic search. I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a 5% or 10% increase in organic search revenue?
Why I Refuse To Settle For Solar System SEO
Something I learned a while back was that if so many people are focusing on just shooting for the moon, shooting for another galaxy turns out in some situations to not be as difficult as it should be. Instead, it just takes high quality focus and time. I spoke about the concept of high quality focus in my “Information Architecture – Rocket Science Simplified” article.
Here’s an example.
Client – Top 5 B to C Niche Market Retailer
| Before Audit | After Audit Implementation | |
| Organic Search Visits | 125,647 | 202,667 |
| Unique Phrases | 32,933 | 58,294 |
| PageViews | 726,240 | 1,072,108 |
The above results have all come through changing the focus on the site from a “shoot for the moon” mentality to my “shoot for the farthest galaxy away” mentality.
Thirty Percent Increase In Revenue
What’s the bottom line result that matters more than all those numbers? How about a 30% increase in revenue from organic search? Yep – thirty percent. Revenue. Income. Bottom line.
How I Did It
As we know, every site is different, so the exact methods applied are going to vary from site to site. Yet the core principles are going to always be the same.
The LDA Connection
The techniques I use, while not exclusively based on topical relationships, are, as it turns out, heavily weighted in a way that happens to fit the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model (LDA) that Dana Lookadoo reported on this past week, and Rand Fishkin did a follow up article on LDA most recently.
Now I am not a rocket scientist, and honestly, I have never studied Information Retrieval. I’ve not even read the comprehensive findings Rand so willingly took the time to write-up. And before the LDA acronym started picking up steam recently, I’d never even heard the term. Instead, I go by instincts. Yes – I rely on my intuition as far as how I understand the user mind to work, and how I perceive the search engines to attempt to generate relevancy results.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
Don’t pick my brain when it comes to LDA, and don’t get into a hissy fit with me by claiming LDA is irrelevant. Take your complaints up with someone else. Please. Because ALL I’m saying is that the majority of the methods I detail here happen to line up quite well with the LDA concept. So as far as I’m concerned, LDA is definitely something the search engines make use of. And if the exact model of LDA isn’t something they rely upon, it sure is close. At least in my experience. And according to Dana, that’s apparently due to the fact that I think like a topical search algorithm.
It’s All About Topical Focus
What the techniques I use result in is ultimately a refinement of topic focus. At the page, section, site, and cross-site level. By refining the quality of the focus aspects of your content, you help the search engines better classify your content as it relates to specific search efforts. It’s a simple concept, actually. Because that effort ultimately achieves the goal of increasing relevance identification. How relevant the content is to a search.
Technique 1 – Go For Higher Value Phrases
If a page is currently optimized for mid-level three or four word phrases, consider refining that down – either to only two word phrases, or perhaps a two word phrase and a three word phrase. And if you do, make sure the primary focus is on whichever of those phrases is the higher value of the two. Both in terms of search volume and accuracy of click-to-conversion value.
Technique 2 – Don’t Stuff Page Titles
When I was brought on board, the site was already doing really well (726 thousand page views in a niche consumer market is nothing to sneeze at). Except the page titles typically contained four, five and in some sections, six phrases on a single page. While you can typically get several phrases into a page Title field, the more you do, the more you’re going to dilute the focus of the page overall. So stick with two, or at most, three phrases.
Don’t just choose any two “similar” phrases. Make sure the two phrases you choose are extremely close to each other in terms of that focus as well. The more closely related, the better.
Technique 3 – Pull Out All The Stops
If you want to get better results, remember that Google is all about relevance – the more closely your page matches the focus of the search, the more relevant the page will be to that search. So don’t go half way in your effort. This means that URL seeding DOES matter. H1s properly matching page title phrases are a must.
Content needs to be high quality, unique, and written with your site visitor’s readability in mind yet where that same content really does communicate in a way that brings attention to the phrases you’re optimizing for. The pages that inbound links come from need to be as closely related as possible. Inbound links require proper anchor text matching. All of these may be common sense, yet most people only do a surface effort in their implementation.
Technique 4 – Unleash the Content
Site navigation needs to allow for as much indexing as possible. My example site here has over 12,000 pages. When I came along, less than 4,000 of them had been able to get into and stay in the index. This was because of the fact that categories had pagination that was mostly blocked by Google. And what the Googlebot could see, was mostly duplicate content due to over-navigation (discussed in my previous Information Architecture article).
By opening up the pagination properly to the Googlebot, eliminating the redundant super-saturated navigation footers, refining and the focus across the board, we’re now averaging over 10,000 pages staying in the index. All those product level pages in turn, increase the authority of the category level pages they all relate to.
Technique 5 – Long Tail Where it Counts
My example site went from being found through 32 thousand phrases to being found through 58 thousand phrases organically in the same comparable time-frame. Except I didn’t achieve that result by increasing the long tail effort. Instead, I actually reduced it.
High quality long tail doesn’t come from intentionally optimizing the entire page for eight ten or twenty long tail versions of your primary phrases. It means doing the footwork to determine two or three long tail phrases that are highly related to the primary phrases, and only using them in the page content. By only seeding related phrases in the content, you maintain the quality of the overall focus, rather than polluting it. And don’t do so much of the long tail work that it dilutes the primary focus either.
By only incorporating long tail in the content, you’re more likely to be able to write content that actually makes sense from a user’s mind model (user thinking). The stronger the primary focus, the more likely the long tail will grow in exponential ways without you trying to force it.
Technique 6 – Don’t Distract When Linking Out
Whether you’re providing a link out to another page on your site or a 3rd party site, make sure the relationship is also highly focused. The more you can match the link anchor text (and the focus of the page you’re pointing to) to the focus of the page you’re working on, the higher the relationship focus.
This applies to in-content links as well as section level links. Don’t have a sub-set of navigation links that points to content not related in a refined way, to the primary sectional focus.
Technique 7 – If Needed, Reorganize Content
Sometimes you will have a site where the content gets out of hand. The focus becomes wider and more diverse over time. Content that really belongs somewhere else ends up in the wrong location. So don’ t just work on individual pages – look at entire sections of the site and ensure the overall focus of each section is highly focused.
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Of course there are always going to be other site-specific tasks to consider, ever changing search algorithms to contend with. Yet even when that’s the case, these principles will hold true. And if you follow them, and IF you can get your recommendations implemented, you may not reach the farthest galaxy. Then again, you just may…
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Photo Credit Nasa
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Information Architecture – Stop Shooting For The Moon
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The Role of Information Architecture in SEO – WebProNews (blog)
Sep 2nd
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The Role of Information Architecture in SEO
WebProNews (blog) When you think about SEO, information architecture is not always one of the first things that come to mind. According to Kim Krause Berg of … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture – Search Engine Land (blog)
Jul 30th
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When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture
Search Engine Land (blog) Have you ever heard the phrase search engine optimization (SEO) architecture? At first glance, it might seem like a good idea because the goal of SEO and … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture
Jul 30th
Have you ever heard the phrase search engine optimization (SEO) architecture? At first glance, it might seem like a good idea…but maybe not. Learn about 2 critical usability tests that help SEO professionals not make critical architecture errors.
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Site Navigation & Information Architecture Fundamentals For SEOs
Jul 16th
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 [...]
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Information Architecture – Rocket Science Simplified
Jul 6th
I can’t count how many times in the past couple years I’ve heard people talk about how important information architecture (also referred to as IA) is to SEO. Yet it’s almost always presented in a way that calls upon a lot of highly technical lingo. Taxonomy. UX. Contextual browsing. Mental model. Ontology. Semantic web… Honestly speaking, I don’t even know what half the lingo means in the moment I hear some of these words.
And my eyes instantly gloss over. Yet in truth, even though I’m not a rocket scientist (nor a library sciences major), it turns out I totally get it – not from a linguistic perspective, but instead, from a visual and marketing perspective. So this is the first in a series of articles that will present otherwise highly complex concepts in hopefully easy to understand ways.
Caveat
Before I proceed, let this be a warning to anyone reading this article who, themselves, might in fact be, speak and breathe in highly technical terms. I’m not here to profess that I fully grasp every single thing about IA. In fact, I may even over-simplify some of the concepts I discuss. I ask your forgiveness in advance, simply because my goal of this and future related articles is to help non-technically advanced people in our industry. The more I (we) can help others understand these principles and concepts, the better we as an industry will become, and the higher quality both of users and search engine results…
Rocket Science Simplified
Okay – so what’s this thing all about? From an SEO perspective, Information Architecture, in plain English, is:
The way and means by which content on a web site is organized and presented for users and the search engines to be able to easily digest and gain the most value from.
Some (but not necessarily all) of the most important aspects of achieving successful information architecture for SEO include:
- Research & Investigation
- Testing & Analysis
- Structural Modeling
- Establishing Relationships
- Design
- Implementation
- Review
So What? I already do all that stuff…
Unfortunately, many people who “think” they know SEO really only know just enough to be dangerous. Or they know enough to get some pretty significant results, but then they hit a performance ceiling.
Just Enough To Be Dangerous
In the former, this can mean the site they’re working on LOOKS like it’s been optimized. It SHOULD be found in the search results. And maybe it does show up for important phrases. Yet the majority of the site ends up stuck on the 2nd, 5th, or 15th page of search results.
(No offense to people I’ve worked with who know just enough to be dangerous – I’m a specialist in SEO and I’ve dedicated hundreds upon hundreds of hours to learn things specific to SEO while you focused on other things, which means I have no clue about those things while you do…)
The Illusion of Success
In the latter, everything APPEARS to be optimized. And in fact, visitor counts coming from search dramatically increased after their work. The site shows up on the 1st page at Google organically for a lot of phrases. Yet ultimately, many of those are the “low hanging fruit” we suggest newbies focus on. Or the visits come from mostly long tail phrases. And that, in turn, means that the site owner is actually missing out on potentially huge numbers of visits or conversions.
(No offense to people I’ve worked with who, until I came along, thought you’d achieved monumental things. The truth is, relatively speaking, you did. It’s just that, because of what I’ve learned over the years, I happened to discover that at one time I too lived under this illusion – and invested a lot of time and energy in learning how to break through to new levels… And that’s why you hired me, for which I am most grateful!)
Too Many Concepts for One Article
Given how much there is that’s involved in a comprehensive approach to information architecture, this first article is going to cover just one such aspect of this topic. I’ll break it down into it’s most basic concepts, yet it’s an area of critical importance. the topic at hand today is Link Relationships and Content Focus.
Link Relationships and Content Focus
How many of you old school SEO people remember the days back when it was common practice to flood the footer with links? Or for you who might now be in the process of filling your individual page content areas with dozens of links directly in the text? You heard, at some point, that either one or the other (or both) of these methods was acceptable. Or you thought it was. Because someone well respected in our industry said something once or six times about how important internal links are. And that it’s all about anchor text…
Or you learned that it’s important to have the links for each section of the site show up on each page within that section…
Or maybe you’d heard that it was a good idea to provide links to “related products”. Or provide ways for people to sort large product result sets…
Well did you ever stop to consider that even though the underlying principle is valid, there can be, under some situations, serious flaws in all of these? Maybe you haven’t seen where it’s a problem, yet maybe you haven’t paid enough attention to consider that it IS a problem, if you thought you have been getting “good enough” visit and conversion numbers…
And maybe using nofollow isn’t enough to address those concerns!
Example Site Internal Link Structure
Again, this article isn’t going to be able to cover every specific scenario regarding internal site links. Yet let’s take a look at an example site and hopefully you’ll get the pattern of what to look for and consider…
A Word About This Example
Note that the mock-ups I’m using are made up but that this does, in fact, come from a real world client. The client in question happens to have over 8,000 pages of content, in dozens of top level categories and more than 100 sub-categories.
At the time I was brought onto this particular project in February, millions of dollars in sales had been garnered through the site. Yet no more than a few thousand pages had been indexed at any given time, and most of those sat on the 3rd, 4th or 10th page of organic results at Google.
While there are a host of reasons for these shortcomings, one of the more complex issues (yet simple to understand once you see the bigger picture), was due to an over-saturation of internal navigation links.
Simple Navigation
Here’s an example of a typical site with simple navigation.
While the above navigation would work on a small site, there has to be a way to have more links as you deal with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of pages. The next screen shows one of the ways they decided to “help site visitors find everything”.
Now the reason this was done by the site owner was, from there perspective, it means that a visitor can quickly get to every main category and sub-category page on the site without having to scroll up. So this was done primarily as a usability choice. Usability is a major consideration in the process of information architecture, and is most often referred to as UX (user experience). So technically, by having all those links in the footer area, it’s a “convenience” factor.
From an SEO perspective, it also means that every page that’s linked from the footer area is given more weight. (Nowadays the word going around is that Google has been discounting the importance of footer links because it’s an area that became abused by people in our industry (and SEO hacks). Nevertheless, this is how the site was architected, and exactly how much value these footer links have or don’t have is open to debate.
But Wait – There’s More!
As is common in today’s web, rather than keeping the top navigation simple, many designers have come up with a method of displaying the links to an individual section of a site only when someone rolls their mouse over that section’s main navigation link. For this site, the result then becomes:
Again, from the site owner’s perspective, this is a usability issue. They don’t want a visitor to have to click through to that section of the site before being presented with all the various sub-category options. And from an SEO perspective, it also ensures every sub-category is given that much more importance since now, every sub-category is linked to from the main navigation across the site.
Site Navigation Gets Complex
Here’s where things start to get quite complex. Once you click on any link related to the first category, you’re presented with that particular page within the category, and lo and behold, you see…
And now we can look at how truly complex this site is. – I present to you, my readers, the full visual of what this site looks like from a navigation perspective…
NOTE – even with all of the links you see above, let’s not forget that there’s also links placed within the content on various pages as well…
Site Navigation Organization
One might argue that the above example actually presents site navigation in a very clean, user friendly, and logical way.
I’d argue that you’re high.
Oh, sure, it’s light-years better than having all of the navigation visible all the time. And it’s convenient to have all those links in the footer.
And by having each section’s navigation sub-set only appear on mouse-over, it’s visually not really overwhelming at all.
Information Architecture For SEO Principle #1- Don’t Confuse The Search Engines
When you look at the above full page view, with all the navigation links revealed, consider, for a moment, that while these are all links, and the gray area is where the actual individual page’s content resides, the fact remains that every link is made up of text. Anchor text. And every link not only has anchor text, but it also has a URL associated with it. So here we have a situation where there’s something like 240 words on that page NOT including the primary content for that specific page.
So even if we don’t even consider what Matt Cutts said a while back about how many links is okay, purely from a numbers game, it means you’ve got thousands of pages on the site that share 80% or more of those same anchor text words and URLs. And given that most pages on the site are product details pages, with no more than a handful of words describing an individual product, and one or a few images and order processing buttons, that means that the vast majority of pages on the site are, for all intents and purposes, not truly unique enough to get the maximum value they need from an SEO perspective.
Be Clear About A Section or Page’s Focus
Now, if all other aspects of the site’s optimization were implemented using industry best practices, the fact happens to be that this issue in and of itself is not an SEO killer. The site has thousands of inbound links. And the sections are grouped in a way that they’re seen as individual sections with each page in the section having a similar focus.
Because of this, there is enough uniqueness assigned to many top level categories based on shared (related) keyword phrases that the site is already coming up high in the organic results for some very competitive phrases. In fact, for some categories, they’re on the 1st page of Google.
Overall though, this IS a problem. There is not ENOUGH depth of unique content on the site in general. So a lot of the content lingers on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th page of results.
Sectional Navigation – A Closer Examination
Okay so here’s a view of the left navigation within one section of the site. The majority of links are for this specific section. That’s a good thing, because it helps users jump to any page within the section effortlessly. But then there’s a link to a page within a completely different category. And links to filter the content based on common ways people like to narrow their results. And then below that, there’s the “you might also like” links.
While this is all good and fine if you’re only thinking about a user’s experience, the fact is that this puts additional emphasis on pages on the site NOT belonging to this specific group of pages. Now if all the other navigation links didn’t exist in the top navigation or the footer, this might be acceptable.
But given how every page on the site has all those top and footer links, the dilution that exists on the left navigation just complicates the ability the search engines have when it comes to deciding the focus of this section.
One way to address this is to use nofollow instructions on each link not specifically pointing to a page within this section. I’ll leave the issue of “how effective” that technique is to another article. Or better yet, you can spend hours reading countless articles on both sides of that argument. 
What I will say is this – by all means, be sure to use the canonical tag on each page within each section of the site that has filter type links. And consider going even further by placing noindex references in your robots.txt file for some of these pages as well. Because the more you can do to help the search engines clarify the true focus of a section or page, the better.
Deep Down The Rabbit Hole
Another serious consideration – one that I’m pushing for on this client site, is the elimination of either the entire set of category links from page footers, or at the very least, the elimination of all sub-category links from the footer. If your argument is that these links both help users AND tell Google the pages linked to are that much more important, I’d argue that the perceived benefits are far outweighed by the dilution of focus.
This is especially true when we get down to the sub-sub category and individual product levels. Now this particular client DID, previously, remove those bottom links entirely. And they saw a dip in their site’s visits. And panicked, then proceeded to put those links back. Which I was a mistake. Because it was a short term phenomena. And by also simultaneously working on other factors related to SEO, I had them remove those bottom links from the product detail pages and the net gain was significant.
Refine Your Focus
We need to do all we can to refine the focus here, and to more carefully place strategic links directly within content. Because links within content that are surrounded by supporting text are much more valuable from an SEO perspective and thus give much more weight to the pages they point to. But even then, remember that “too many links” is an important concept when it comes to saturating paragraph rich content.
It Doesn’t Take A Rocket Scientist
The above example is pretty extreme. Yet it points out an issue that needs to be considered whenever you are building or maintaining or optimizing a web site. Every section on a site needs to have enough uniqueness of focus to tell the search engines that “this set of pages within the site are related to this set of phrases.” And “This page within this section is truly unique compared to every other page in this section, yet at the same time, there’s enough similarities that it’s obvious all of the pages in this section are, in fact, related.”
When you can look at SEO from this perspective, and you can sit and “feel” whether these statements are true, given navigation as a factor, you’re well on your way to ensuring each page has a high enough value, and the sum total value of all pages in a section, in turn, has enough value to show up higher in the organic results.
Not So Fast, Slick Willy!
Of course, sadly, I need to emphasize here that even when you THINK you’ve got your internal site’s navigation figured out for maximum value, it still may not be enough. Is there really enough depth of unique primary content on each page compared to every other page on the site? Is there enough unique content on those individual pages compared to your competitors? And the same question comes up for the entire section – as compared to other sections on your site and also similar sections on other sites…
And how many high quality links have you obtained from 3rd party sites pointing to your section level pages? Because that, too, will be a factor. Not to mention the quality of your keyword research and subsequent on page and under-the-hood seeding – both as it relates to individual pages and as each page within a section relates to each other page…
But Why Bother?
Some of you may have already said to yourselves – why bother? I’ve got so many inbound links pointing to my category level pages that it doesn’t matter…
Well, it may not matter to you. But to me, it’s about finding every way possible to squeeze out as much SEO value as possible while not completely sacrificing the user experience. And for sites like this client example, where I’m paid in an ongoing contract to continually come up with additional ways to improve the bottom line financially for my client, I can achieve more long lasting results in less time by addressing this topic than I can by obtaining links that may or may not one day be useless, or even harmful. Because at the end of the day, the site’s internal information architecture factors will always be factors. And while they may be less of a factor some day, the only way to compare apples to apples is not just with inbound link or external mention authority, but down and dirty on-site considerations.
For more information on Information Architecture
If you’d like to explore the topic of information architecture there are many great resources. An IA overview article came out over at SearchEngineLand just this past week. And Louis Rosenfeld, a leading expert currently providing Information Architecture consulting services to PayPal, has a great and very simple visual that shows three of the primary areas of discipline that encompass IA from a professional development perspective. If you are curious to learn more, I also suggest checking out the IA glossary provided by the Victoria, Australia State government.
People in our industry who are truly rocket scientists (at least when it comes to IA) you may want to speak with or follow include Dave Harry, Terry Van Horne, and Adam Audette (author of a pretty lengthy SEO Guide to Information Architecture). And if you’re really feeling frisky, my final recommendation is to join the SEO Dojo – a community site chock full of IA content, as well as a host of resources and threaded discussions on all things Search marketing. (And where the Weekly Chat is a place to get completely overwhelmed (or get some serious minds working on some of your most challenging questions!)…
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Information Architecture – Rocket Science Simplified
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