Information Architecture &Search Engine Optimization

Presented by:Daniel Schulman

Daniel Schulman

My own consulting company where I mostly do lead generation and local search such as law firms and summer camps

Donordigital is an online fundraising, advocacy, and marketing agency that works with non-profit organizations, campaigns, and socially responsible businesses.

The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.

http://www.iainstitute.org/en/learn/resources/what_is_ia.php

Information Architecture

usability

findability

Website Visitors

People RobotsUsability / Findability Spiderability / Indexability

Improving Spidering & Indexing

• URL

Canonicalization

• Preferred URL's

• Page Redirects

• Navigation Elements

• Site Maps

• Missing Pages

• Duplicate Pages

• Content Gaps

• PageRank Sculpting

• Page Templates

URL CanonicalizationLack of a Preferred Domain

URL CanonicalizationDefault Pages

URL CanonicalizationURL Parameters

• http://www.example.com/?param1=one&param2=two

• http://www.example.com/?param1=one&param2=2

• http://www.example.com/?param1=one

Content Gaps

• Synonyms– Death Penalty / Capital Punishment– Lawyer / Attorney

• Logically Missing– Tax Deductible Charity

• Opportunistic– Jobs Board

Missing Pages (404 Errors)

PageRank Sculpting

• Reorganization of Links• Rel="No Follow"• Deep Links• Robot Instructions

PageRank SculptingReorganization of Links

Takeaways

• Spiderability is as important as usability – don't assume webcrawlers can navigate your website.

• Indexability is similar to findability – the webmaster needs to indicate what the content is all about and what is most important. Don't leave it to your site visitors (whether human or robotic) to figure it out.