Good day, happy Wednesday my SEO comrades! Search Engine Academy has yet another post for you about Information Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). By now, you know how these go together – like peanut butter and jelly, like scotch and soda, and so on. But others don’t, so please feel free to let your colleagues know about our blog series, umkay? Thanks!

We are talking about creating usable, readable reports for your client that outline your IA efforts. This is where you get the final go-ahead from the decision makers (those who have the money to make this finally happen), so you want your report to be the very best it can be.

I’m going to wrap up this series on the IA report by talking about how to present the IA impact on the content management system. You need to address the relationship between your proposed IA and the content management system or structure. The impact is direct.

First, let’s talk about three effective content management components.

Rules

Content is managed by establishing processes. This covers creation, publishing and maintaining website cotent. Grammar, style and other writing guidelines are part of the rules.

Roles

This part consists of the folks who do the content management processes under the established rules and guidelines. These people probably also review, update and create new rules and processes as needed. There may be specific roles – some people may only create, optimize and upload meta data, while others write and edit the content. You may have your content management system (CMS) developers and techs’ roles listed here as well.

Resources

Included here is the actual content and the storage format for both static and dynamic content. The CMS software is also a resource.

Templates

Data is dynamically pulled from other sources can be dumped into templates. You may have developed several templates for different content types. Be sure to include the navigation structure that addresses global, local and contextual navigation schemes you have come up with.

Meta Data

Not only is this the title and description information, but it could include the author, publisher, title and date the content was published to the site. You may also have these areas of meta data:

• Expiration Date
• Links
• Document Type
• Subject Area
• Keywords
• Related To
• Geographic Areas

Thesaurus

You really need a thesaurus to make your meta data easier to find. It’s usually for the folks behind the curtain – the staffers, writers, editors, etc.

Alright, enough about that. Let’s move to the project plan!

It can be very helpful to crate a project outline to track the delivery dates for the final products. What’s good about the project plan is it should ask and answer these questions:

• How will it be accomplished?
• How long is it going to take?
• Who has to do it?
• What are the required deliverables?
• What’s dependent upon each of these?

Just good project planning 101, people! This is a reality check. It bridges that gap between strategy and design, and can be implemented with plans from other teams, like the application developers, authors, etc.

It might be best to do a short term and long term project plan. The easier stuff that can be done rather quickly could be in the short term project outline. This could include design changes that will improve the IA. Long term project plans include the inter-dependencies with other teams.

Presentations

OK, so you’ve done all of this hard work…you aren’t done yet, but you’re getting there! Please do not think that if you bust your heinie on this report that the world will now make it happen. Probably not, OK?

Better that you do a presentation to follow up the report delivery. Folks may need clarification, they might have questions, they probably have hand grenades they want to lob at your worth effort. Plus, who the hell likes reading a 50 page report?

You may need to schedule a series of presentations for multiple stakeholders. You’re going to need buy-in, and you have to be prepared for objections. You will be most successful if you can communicate clearly in non-tech non-geek speak that helps people understand that IA is a good thing.

Make it visually appealing. Don’t just slap text on a power point, read it out loud to a room full of people and expect to feel love. That wont’ happen. Use charts, graphs, diagrams, pictures…whatever it takes. Don’t forget to use a metaphor or two, if that’ll illustrate the point as well.

Take the time to come up with a compelling title. If your presentation is anchored to a metaphor, use it in the title to generate interest.

Alrighty then…we are going to stop here today. We will start next week with outlining your IA design and documentation. Until next time, think about if you had to do a high level IA presentation. What would it look like? How would it sound?

Keep it between the ditches until then!

All the very best to you,

Good day, all of you SEO heroes! Welcome back to another Wednesday edition of Information Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO) brought to you by Search Engine Academy!

We are diving deep into how to best implement your IA strategy. We are specifically going over methods for capturing your IA ideas for either a new website, or a website redesign. Last time, we talk about using metaphors to get the point across.

Today, let’s talk about using a few more traditional methods – scenarios, case studies and diagrams.

Scenarios

If you’re using wire diagrams or blueprints, they can be a little dry, don’t you think so? If you want to make it a little more lively, and less like a sleeping pill, think about developing a scenario to describe the user’s navigation and site experience. Who knows, if you use this, new ideas to further improve the navigation and architecture may come out.

If you’ve done your user research, it’s possible that during the discussions, scenarios may have bubbled up. I hope you captured those, because they might be just the thing to use. The other thing to think about is if you have multiple target audiences and users, you’ll probably need different scenarios. Here are some things to ask yourself:

• Who is using your site?
• Why and how are they going to use the site?
• Are they rushed, or will they take their time?

You should tap into marketers expertise in developing personas. Now use that persona to use your site’s features and see what occurs to you.

Case Studies

Why not tell a story? IA is complicated and abstract. The technical vocabulary alone can put people off, just like SEO techno-talk. So, create a case study and tell a story.

Conceptual Diagrams

Pictures are worth a lot of words, don’t you agree? Try creating a concept diagram using pictures to illustrate the point. Here’s one from the excellent book “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville:

 

So there you have it. Hopefully this has given you some ideas about how to present your IA efforts. That’s it for this week. Next time, we’ll talk about developing strategy reports. Communication is critical for acceptance! Until next time, keep it between the ditches safely, umkay?

All the very best to you,

Hello, all you SEO heroes out there! How are you? Here at Search Engine Academy, we are well. 2013 is rolling right along, and since we updated all the course material in late 2012, and have begun teaching it 2013, one of the new sections is information architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). We’ve haven’t had a lot of classes yet, so the feedback has been minimal, but positive thus far.

But I’m digressing, so let’s get back to the topic of this post. Every Wednesday I give you some tips on how to incorporate IA with your SEO efforts. We are talking about implementing your IA strategy into your website.

One thing you’ll do as an IA expert is start brainstorming for creating an organization and structure for your website before you even do your research. While doing that research, you should be constantly thinking about how you may need to revise the picture in your head around content organization, labeling and navigation schemes. Good for you!

As an IA person, you should start very early in the process of talking about implementing IA strategy with the team you hopefully are working with. With that, when do you start sketching out wireframes? When do you show these to the client? When do you start testing with users?

It’ll become apparent to you as to when you do these tasks, but keep in mind that at some point during the research part, you’ll feel the law of diminishing returns. You’ve stopped getting new ideas and revelations. When you hit this point – and you will – it’s time you started scheduling incorporating the IA strategy into the website design and testing.

Use blueprints, drawings and wireframes to communicate your IA strategy with the design and content team. Begin your testing and measure the results.

As you test and measure, you will see where you might need to revisit certain pieces of the plan and strategy you put together. That’s OK; IA is meant to be flexible and changing. Don’t give up, and keep an open mind. My motto for SEO and my life is “Semper Gumby” – always flexible.

Maybe it should be yours.

Next week, I’ll go over the strategy process in more depth. We’ll look at a process flow that has been proven to work well.

Until then, keep it between the ditches and think about your IA strategy and when to put it to the test, umkay?

All the best,

OK, Search Engine Academy is back with another Wednesday post on Information Architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO). We are deep in discussing how to implement IA for your website. We talked about user testing last week. Now let’s talk about doing research as part of initially designing a website or doing a re-design.

What do we mean by conducting research for our website anyways?

Well, we want to know what is the business goal of the website, for one thing. Are we strictly selling stuff and services, or are we trying to get folks to call or email us for more information?

Who are the desired web visitors? What do they look like? What is their pain point and why would they use our site to fix their issues?

What information and content should we be posting? How should we present it? What resonates with our target audience?

Research, people, research is going to help us focus on what will work best. I cannot tell you how many people attend our SEO training and they have slapped together a website for as few bucks as possible and not a whole hell of a lot more effort either. And they wonder why nobody visits the site, and if they do, they exit it like their butts are catching fire and they are trying to run away from it.

By doing this research and collecting this information, you can develop a blueprint of how the site should look and deliver. This research needs to be shared with the web development team, the writers, sales and communication teams. This ensures that everyone is working towards a common goal.

This research may occur in separate phases, or it could be done across multiple disciplines. Be sure your researchers are the same ones who are participating in the active design and test phase.

Research doesn’t have to be complicated. But don’t skip it, because you’ll end up paying for it after the fact in lost sales, re-design time and money, and major heartburn. It doesn’t have to be that way if you’ll just stop, take a deep breath, and say to yourself, “I am going to do this intelligently.”

If you’re in a corporate setting, you may experience push back on the research. People will blather on about how there’s no time or money to do this, we know what to do already, we did research back in the Stone Age.

Well, those all may be true arguments. Your job is communicate that all those need to be at least calmly reviewed and discussed. By doing research now, time and money will be saved on the launch end. Mistakes will be minimized. Minor tweaking is less expensive than scrapping the whole damn thing and starting over.

Stress that user testing can be very enlightening and the site will get a more favorable reaction when it’s been reviewed by test users.

Research that was done way back when is probably outdated. The world keeps changing and moving on, and it’s true with the internet, and how people are using it. Back in the day, it was enough to have a simple site that gave some basic information in a stripped down format. Nowadays, that doesn’t cut it.

OK, enough about all this. Think about the arguments you need to construct and present. It’s always about time and money, isn’t it?

Until next week, keep it between the ditches, as always!

Best to you,