Bastian Grimm - 4/4 - State of Search

Information Architecture: Common pitfalls (2/2)

This is part two of the post Information Architecture: Common pitfalls. The first part was published yesterday, find it here.

And if you’re done with that it’s now time to move on to re-organizing the contents. Things you might consider:

Flattened site architecture

Considering the facts that there is a limited amount of links each page can carry (in the webmaster help center Google states that it should be not more than 100 links – however this very much depends on the authority the domain has) and that it is important how many steps down a page resides within the domain (aka how many clicks from the homepage does it take me to get to that specific page?) there really is one problem to tackle: Keep the “depth” to a reasonable number. There is a great visualization on this over at webmasterworld.com: (more…)

Information Architecture: Common pitfalls (1/2)

Editorial comment: We welcome Bastian Grimm to our blogging team! His first post will be published in two, today part 1, tomorrow part 2.

“A properly optimized and therefore search engine friendly information architecture is probably one of the most underestimated on-page optimization concepts in search.” – That being said, welcome to my very first post at State of Search!

I think one of the reasons – maybe even the number one reason – for websites not having real success online is poor information architecture. You see that happen all the time: Basic rules, for example “one piece of content, one static URL” are not considered and guess what: Most of these websites do badly in search! And since I will be attending Search Engine Strategies 2010 in San Francisco and do a coverage for State of Search and the agenda looks like they’re having a dedicated session on this very specific topic (really looking forward to that one!), I thought it might be nice to revisit some parts of good IA and do an overview on what is important to consider. There are a lot of great resources out there – if you know some more please feel free to mention them in the comments.

But before we really dive into that, let’s have a quick look on a possible IA definition. While doing some research on the phrase itself I came across an organization called the Information Architecture Institute (honestly, I hadn’t really heard of them before. They have a pretty solid definition of what IA means: “The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.” – So let’s see how this correlates with the topics we’re visiting during this post. And a quick side note: Yes, I’m mainly covering the search point of view and for sure will be simplifying things a lot – in a real-world process you’d pretty sure work together with a user-experience designer, etc. (more…)