IA/UX MEETUP: Significance, Search & IA
Ruth Burr talked about SEO at Seattle IA/UX Meetup
UX in the Wild -February 12 2013
Significance, Search & Information Architecture
Piecora’s Pizza in Capitol Hill, Seattle WA
This month’s Seattle AI/UX Meet UP group featured Ruth Burr of SEOMoz and Ian Lurie of Portent who spoke about the relationship of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Information Architecture and User Experience. So much of our work in IA & UX is about collaboration across departments and teams, so we invited people who really know SEO to speak directly to cross-discipline team work.
Ian’s topic, The toilet bowl of DEATH and 2 other tales from SEO, UX and IA. His 3 main points were to ensure your site is:
- Conical: Each info chunk has one unique address (no dups)
- Findable: All intended information consumers can navigate to and read every chunk (misfit chunks)
- Significant: Bring clarity and priority, revealing chunks when needed. Coined the “exploding menu syndrome” he used an example of
50 Categories:
shoes/link.aspx
dresses/link.aspx
etc.
OR
<a href = “~”>
Analytic side of SEO. Opportunity Map
Ian’s slideshow
Ruth focused on marketing in SEO terms. Use language people use to search. Sharability: Quality content so it’s sharable. Get what you want: make sure users get what they want and expect.
Ruth’s slideshow
Given the scope of information you need to keep in mind–from key words to content to coding to analytics–the main take easy is bring a SEO rep to the requirements table. And as we know too well, it’s much harder and more expensive to retrofit and redesign design and code after the fact.
A few more heuristics (top level)
(Sourced from Ian Lurie’s slideshow, SEO Analytics – Middle Earth Style
- Code for unique content chunks
- Make your content findable, so avoid an image if at all possible
- Keyword diversity
- Indexed pages
- Load time
- Domain authority
- Social
- Organic traffic
- Organic conversions
- Finding opportunity gaps / opportunity map
- Estimate difficulty to get there
- Eliminate onsite duplication
Presenters:
Ruth Burr (@RuthBurr) is an SEO and data-driven marketer living in Seattle. She is currently the Lead SEO at SEOmoz, where she builds and executes SEO strategy for SEOmoz.org
Ian Lurie (@Portentint) is CEO at Portent, an internet marketing agency he started in 1995 on the belief that great marketing helps people make good decisions. At Portent, he leads and trains a team that covers SEO, PPC, social media and marketing strategy.
