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What is the relationship between Information Architecture (IA) and SEO?
The Information Architecture definition, in terms of a website, can be defined as the organisation & structure of a web page. This is of paramount importance in SEO, as it allows for both a user of the website and a search engine robot to find information clearly, and in a set structure.Like puzzles? Then you'll love IA.
The relationship between IA and SEO grows all the time, and the desire for clean, well-structured code and semantically optimised web pages is never going to be a negative for any webmaster or user of a website. By doing this, you are helping Google's (or any search engine for that matter) spiders be able to crawl your web pages quickly and understand what each page is about with clear understanding of the meta data, h1 tag and content.
Usability and Information Architecture
Good architecture is responsible for making it easy to find information. You can do this most effectively by getting people to test how they use your website. Testing is important; in terms of SEO, you can't test how good your search engine rankings will be before they go live. Unless you sat a Google robot down and asked him how easy finding his/her way around the page was, then bought him a drink to encourage good rankings. However, usability is important in every aspect for a user of a website, and SEO has to consider the user as well.How Does Information Architecture relate to SEO?
Web Page Code:The web is evolving at a very fast rate, becoming more competitive and diverse all the time. As a result, mistakes can be a frequent occurrence. Broken markup is an all too common problem for search engines; Google could feel that this is an area to focus on for marking a website down in the search engine.
Therefore, always focus on clean code that can be easily crawled and understood.
As content is the most important part of the SEO game then it is also worth keeping in mind that the content should be situated high in the source code for the page.
Finally, remember that every image should contain an alt attribute that contains a keyword that describes the image (unless it's a placeholder image, in which case, use alt="")! For other media, like videos, the titles should contain keywords as well.
Structure/Accessibility:
This should be easily laid out in the back end and front end of a page for easy crawling by a search engine and, in turn, indexing of pages in the index. It is important to think about the user in this area:
- What do they expect when they come to the website?
- Have the pathways for them to get to this page been easily accessible?
- How easy is the information to access now?
All questions that need answering and should be in the front of the architect's mind when creating the page. It is important to remain consistent in your navigation and structure; it can be difficult when you are trying to break norms of conventional navigation, but what must remain consistent is the structure of a web page for SEO.
Content
Simply put, keep it engaging and simple! The content should remain high in the source code, like I said before, but the important thing to remember is that search engines give you a slap over the head and 1000 lines for every second word being a keyword. It also will be useless to people reading it.
On-page links (Internal)
Internal links are a great way to help a user navigate their way through the website, however, don't overdo it, and make sure that the link to a page has relevant anchor text.
Summary
Think about the user and think about the crawler. IA has a place for every aspect of building a web site, from design to SEO so the relationship with it has never been closer when considering how competitive 'getting online' is.Fixing a code-heavy website is similar to a spring clean - get rid of the unnecessary, move what you can into include files and keep only the minimal amount of code with descriptive keywords throughout the content. The structure of the site and of each and every page should be clear so that it helps engage the user and makes it easy for them to navigate from page to page.
Creating a well-coded website forms the basis of SEO, so you can then add all the right content to acquire all the right links.
