Information Architecture

Website structure, also sometimes referred to as information architecture, describes the logical flow of content on your site. A site that is well structured tends to focus on one overall major theme, and branch out from that theme into pages that are continually more focused, specific, and relevant to the overarching topic of the site.

For instance, a well architected website selling Caribbean cruises would branch into sub-topics (sub-directories and/or sub-menus) that flesh out the main theme. These sub-areas of the site might focus on specific Caribbean ports of call, cruise lines, specials / deals, thematic cruises, local culture, and anything else relevant to Caribbean cruises.

Furthermore, search engine crawlers will tend to primarily crawl links that are at most three or four clicks away from your homepage, therefore you should strive to keep your most important content within those 3-4 tiers.

SEO Friendly URL Structures

Your website structure is defined by the various primary and secondary navigational structures in use on your site, and is comprised of all the URLs that point to pages on your site.

Here again, the layout of your site in terms of the location of individual pages should be logical and intelligible to both visitors and search engines. This is often best accomplished by sticking to static URLs (also called permalinks in some blogging and content management systems like WordPress).

Using static URLs will offer a number of advantages:

Reduce or eliminate crawling problems associated with dynamic, parameterized URLs

Parameterized URLs are addresses that have variables or values after the “?” character. In the past, search engines had problems crawling websites that used dynamic URLs. Nowadays the major search engines can generally follow most parameterized links, however it still may not be 100% reliable.

Causes of overly complex URLs include such things as page and affiliate referral ids, sorting, searching, and date parameters, and unique session IDs.

Short, descriptive, and memorable = communicable

Just like a virus and true to viral marketing, your messages (and as a result your URLs) must be communicable to others. Do your most important URLs pass the “phone test”? If you cannot easily tell someone, verbally, the location of your page then the URL is probably too complex.

Incorporate your most relevant keywords into your URLs and directory structure

Using keywords in your URLs serves 3 important purposes – 1) it is yet another indicator to search engines to let them know what your page is about, 2) the keywords will be bolded in the SERPs, resulting in potentially more clicks through to your site, and 3) if anyone links to your page using the URL as the link anchor text, your most important keywords will be included in the link anchor text; this can be extremely beneficial to search engine rankings for that page.

For example, if you are a Travel web site and your main products are cruises, flights, and hotels, you could have the following directory/URLs:

http://www.yoursite.com/cruises/5-day-alaskan-cruise.html

http://www.yoursite.com/flights/alaska-seat-sales.html

http://www.yoursite.com/hotels/4-star-anchorage-alaska.html

Prevent the accidental creation of “Infinite Spaces”

Infinite spaces are created when you have a dynamic linking method that is perpetual and infinite – for example a calendaring application that uses dynamically generated URLs for each and every month into the future. Each time a crawler finds a calendar page, it encounters a link for the next month, and the next and the next forever into the future.

This is what Google calls an Infinite Space, and you want to avoid that on your site. A search engine crawler arrives at your site with a certain “crawl budget” – that is a certain number of pages, or kilobytes, or bandwidth it will crawl and consume before moving on to the next site. If your links are providing no added value and are consuming crawl budget, you are preventing your more valuable content from being crawled and indexed.

Reduce and eliminate duplicate content

As discussed in this post on duplicate content, search engines will filter out duplicate content and may even levy an penalty against your site for publishing it. Having excessive out-of-control parameterized URLs all pointing to the same content substantially increases your chances of getting dinged for having duplicate content.

Information architecture is a broad and interesting field that spans many information domains – not just the web and SEO. If you know of any good tools, articles, or other information architecture resources please share in the comments below.

Naturally, Google and others had to crack down on this, and crackdown they did. This is why you’ll often hear about the dreaded “duplicate content penalty” if you’re tuned in to SEO circles.

Truth is, it’s not so much a penalty as it is a filter. Unless you’re seriously and blatantly trying to abuse the system, Google will not systematically penalize or ban you from their results for having duplicate content.

Duplicate content however can and will work against your search engine rankings. But before we dive into the downsides, let’s first get a clearer understanding of what is and is not duplicate content.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content issues occur when two or more pages, each with a significant percentage of the same content as the other(s), are openly available on the web and thus available for a search engine spider to crawl. Quite simply it’s two or more web pages on the same or different domain, that have mostly the same content.

Below are eight common ways duplicate content can be inadvertently created by an otherwise honest webmaster:

1. Purposely using doorway pages that have different domains but with the same content on them. While the pages eventually direct the user to the home site, search engines don’t take the purpose of doorway pages into consideration.

2. If you syndicate your content such as submitting your articles and making them available to different sites and directories, don’t be surprised if search engines choose the copy on one of these other sites as the authoritative version.

3. If you run an affiliate program and use affiliate tracking links to track referrals and conversions, search engines might see affiliate landing pages as being duplicate content. For example, you might use http://www.yoursite.com while your affiliate uses http://www.yoursite.com?affiliateid=1234. This can also be a huge problem for so-called “canned” and “turn-key” websites because it means that your chances of ranking, as the owner of one of these “slices” of a larger website, are slim to none. I’ve seen this first hand with real estate agents who buy into a turn-key web “solution”; it is also rampant in MLM systems and across many other industries.

4. One or more pages in your site might have multiple unique URLs pointing to them even if they are the same page. This is often due to URL parameterization. For example, even though http://www.yoursite.com/yourproduct=1&type=52 and http://www.yoursite.com/type=52 might point to the same product page, search engines will still consider this duplicate content even though there was no intention to cheat. This is a common problem for many sites, particularly those built with content management systems.

5. A subdomain such as http://aboutus.yoursite.com that has the same content as http://www.yoursite.com/aboutus/page.html is also duplicate content.

6. Press releases published on the main company website might also appear on a subsidiary company’s website. Cross-publishing content across a family of brands is not uncommon. However, it can still be considered duplicate content.

7. One scenario that is often overlooked but is probably the most common duplicate content problem is http://yoursite.com being exactly the same as http://www.yoursite.com. Although every website will encounter this problem, not very many properly address it, even though it can be solved with a simple “301 redirect” to consolidate the “www” and “non-www” version of your website.

8. Another very common scenario is the inclusion of convenient “print” and “pdf” versions of a page on your website, which lead to the same content as the primary page formatted for printing or viewing in Adobe Acrobat.

Duplicate Content Filter

Search engines mainly deal with duplicate content by choosing one of the pages to be authoritative, and filtering out all the rest from the search engine results. After all, Google is in the business of providing hyper-relevant results, so why would they want to present what amounts to the same page multiple times to a searcher?

Now all those other pages are not necessarily penalized in any way, they are just not returned in search results and often they are not even indexed at all.

For example, if a search engine finds duplicate content on two or more different domains, they will only choose one of these pages to list in their index. And you can still lose out on being listed in search engine results even if you own the content.

Duplicate Content Penalty

If search engines like Google or Yahoo find that you are indeed deliberately and aggressively trying to cheat the system by using the same content to rank multiple times in their results, it can lead to a ban. Rest assured however this is less of a concern for your average website.

The Problem With Duplicate Content and How to Avoid It

It’s best to avoid duplicate content not necessarily because the penalty is as scary as many search engine myths about duplicate content say, but because it works against your search engine and online business success by keeping your pages from getting good rankings, or even showing up in search results.

Google, for example, continuously screens for duplicate content and uses a number of indicators to ultimately choose the authoritative page to index while ignoring all the other duplicate pages.

Even if the duplicate pages are all on your own site, you still end up diluting your ability to rank for that particular page by forcing those pages to compete against one another in the search engines.

Ultimately you should take the time to shut down any potential source of duplicate content by ensuring the search engines only index your authoritative page.

For pages on your own site, make sure duplicate pages are blocked from crawlers through the use of the “nofollow” link attribute and appropriate use of the “meta robots” page tag. Another more recent approach is to include a “rel=canonical” link tag in the header of the page to specify the authoritative URL for a particular page of content. This is particularly useful in some CMS systems that present the same content under a variety of different URLs.

As you add new pages to your site, it’s also important to get them indexed by the search engines as quickly as possible. This gives the search engine a strong indicator that your page is first and therefore authoritative; it’s also how scrapers and spammers can swipe your content as their own by beating you to the punch.

Content Checkers and Further Reading

If you’re worried about other sites duplicating your content, a quick check on Copyscape will let you know whether there are other sites on the web that have content significantly similar to yours.

For more information on duplicate content straight from the horse’s mouth, read this excellent Google Webmaster Central blog post on duplicate content.

What are your strategies for avoiding duplicate content? What tools do you like to use? Let us know in the comments below.

Why SEO is Fundamental to CMS Selection

In this day and age of relatively cheap (including many free) content management systems (CMS), it’s no wonder why so many businesses and organizations are choosing to forgo a typical static HTML site in favor of a full featured web platform capable of many dynamic and advanced features straight out of the box.

There’s no doubt, content management systems are a quick, powerful, and affordable way to get on to the web in an advanced way, but as they say nothing ever comes free and the same is true of content management systems. They do not come without their challenges, particularly in terms of how well they can be tuned for search engine optimization.

The Problem with Content Management Systems and SEO

As a search engine optimization specialist, I’ve had the pleasure of optimizing some of the more popular content management systems like Joomla and WordPress. I’ve also been asked to estimate search engine optimization projects for some fairly esoteric content management systems. In the process, I’ve identified some of the key issues that exist with many of the systems out there.

The main issues with content management systems are unfortunately a result of their greatest strength – the ability to quickly and easily create and deploy content. A CMS is a publishing tool, first and foremost, and on that point it cannot fail. As a result, it has to be relatively simple to use. But with all that usability goodness, the ability to continually bend and mold to the ever changing search engine landscape was certain to be overlooked.

Of course in some situations, that’s perfectly fine. Maybe you don’t care about search engine visitors finding your site. Maybe the ability to manage content efficiently across your organization is the primary goal (as would be the case with an intranet). However for many businesses, free search engine traffic is the lifeblood of the website and generating sales opportunities and needs to be given top priority when selecting a CMS.

Fortunately, some of the content management systems we discuss and recommend have been able to strike the delicate but important balance between design aesthetics, usability, and search engine friendliness.

How to Choose an SEO friendly CMS

Choosing a CMS is not all about SEO. There are many other factors to bear in mind including cost, support, usability, aesthetics, syndication tools, and performance. Ultimately, the goal is to strike a healthy balance between your organization’s requirements, your audience’s requirements, and the search engines’ requirements.

A search engine friendly CMS should have most if not all of the following attributes. The “why it’s important” of many of these specific points will be covered in more detail in future posts, but for now this should serve as a good start when evaluating a platform yourself or developing a list of questions to ask a potential web designer or CMS vendor.

Checklist: What to Look For in a Search Engine Friendly CMS

• Size of the supporting community. A massive user base and developer base usually means that you’ll be able to find the components and resources you need to SEO your CMS quickly and affordably.
• Support for customization of Title tags, Meta tags, image Alt tags, and link rel=canonical tags on a per-page (or per-image) basis.
• Control of Meta Robots tag on a per-page basis.
  
• Support for static, customizable URLs (sometimes called permalinks).
• Automatic link management. Moving a page to a new location shouldn’t require a manual site-wide update of links pointing to that page.
• Automatic updating of a sitemap.xml file when site content is added or changed.
• Support for a custom 404 (page-not-found) page.
• Availability of search engine friendly design themes and/or support for tweaking a theme to make it more optimized for search engines.
• Ability to customize the link anchor text in content embedded links that point to other pages internal and external to your site.
• Flexibility to add custom attributes to the HTML tags that define the structure of the page. This is particularly useful for adding the rel=nofollow attribute to internal or external links as required.
• Support for web 2.0 and community oriented features such as blogs, forums, and social tagging and bookmarking.
• Support for custom URL redirection (typically using a 301 redirect). Sometimes this can be accomplished by using mod_rewrite and editing the .htaccess file, but that can get complicated. Some CMS platforms provide a much easier and elegant way to manage redirections directly through the administrative user interface.

Some Recommended Content Management Systems for SEO

The following content management systems have a reputation in the search engine optimization community for being particularly well suited for search engines. Some work reasonably well straight out of the box but most will need to be customized to truly embrace SEO best practices.

• Joomla
  
• WordPress (Traditionally a blogging tool, but makes for a nice lightweight CMS)
• MODx
• Drupal
• Expression Engine

What’s your number one choice for an SEO CMS? Let us know in the comments below.

Twitter PR Strategy

Originally uploaded by ogilvyprworldwide

If, as an organization, you find yourself wanting to engage an audience through blogging and micro-blogging social media outlets like Twitter, this chart from Ogilvy PR Worldwide should help get you started.

Usually when an organization struggles to answer the question “What is it, exactly, that we’ll say?”, the root of the problem can be traced back to a lack of a coherent communications strategy that matches the medium (social media) and the tool (Twitter).

What’s Your Twitter Strategy?

Like any good plan, this chart will help you first define your communications goals (Strategy Column) which may be Customer Relations, Crisis Management, Event Coverage, or any other objective important to your organization.

Once your goal is defined, you need to engage the audience first by defining them and then listening in (Follow Column). Following the right people on Twitter – the people who can help you get your message to the target audience – is the critical research component of your communications strategy. It will help you properly frame your content and engagement approaches to take the “You View” – in other words try to see through the eyes and tweets of your audience first.

Finally, once you have an objective and a good understanding of your audience, you’re ready to Create content that will appeal to them and Engage them at the right place and time with the right content.

None of this has to be long and arduous. The important thing is to hash out an initial plan, get involved, and adapt as you learn, and this framework should help in overcoming the inertia of getting started.

Now get out there and start tweeting!

If the secret to going viral on Twitter is to get retweeted, these blog posts from renowned bloggers, Internet marketers, and social media experts should get you started on the right track to creating the kind of Twitter content that will have your audience practically begging to retweet you! (how’s that for hyping it up?)

So you can hit the ground running with some good, solid, how-to-go-viral information, the first set of posts explore the more practical and creative elements of how to get retweeted.

And if you’re anything like me, you always need to know “why” things work the way they do (could be the engineer in me).  If that’s you, the second set of posts will give you a good solid grounding in the science and theory of getting retweeted and going viral on Twitter.

So without further ado, here’s how to get retweeted.

The Art of Getting Retweeted

How to Get Re-Tweeted by Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz

Great video overview of getting re-tweeted with some fresh Twitter-bait ideas:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – How to Get Re-Tweeted from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

How to Get Retweeted by Guy Kawasaki

In this post for the American Express OPEN Forum, Guy Kawasaki outlines six tips for making your tweets more viral:

1. In your tweets answer the question: “What’s interesting to my followers?”
2. What’s the one thing all of your followers have in common?  Twitter of course!  So talk about Twitter.
3. Tweet How-to’s and other instructional and informational tidbits.  In other words, tie the topic of your tweet to a tangible outcome that’s desired by your followers.
4. Break news.  Being in-the-know is social currency, and the earlier you know about something the more valuable it is to you and others who follow you.
5. For some reason people have always been drawn to the sensational, outrageous, unconventional, and bizarre, and therefore these types of tweets are ripe for retweeting.
6. Boost your credibility by including a supporting link.

The 20 Words and Phrases that Will Get You the Most ReTweets by Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella sifts through the top 10,000 (out of over 158,000) retweets in his ReTweet Mapper database to uncover the top 20 keywords and phrases found in the most frequent retweets, and explains why these words lend themselves to being retweeted.

Tweetbait: 7 Ways to Get Retweets by Brian Carter

Brian Carter analyzes 10 days of his own personal tweets and retweets to answer the question: “What gets tweeted the most?” Among the seven tips (go to the post to read them all) were two very interesting and novel ideas:

1. Consider retweeting yourself 3-4 times a day, if you have something that is really interesting to your audience.  People jump on and off Twitter all day long, so this boosts your chances of being noticed. Do not be annoying with this tactic.
2. An even better approach, when tweeting about lists and list posts, trickle your tweets out over time by tweeting about one item on the list at a time.  I thought this was a tremendously insightful tip!

How to get ReTweeted – The Formula by Louise Doherty

Aside from the obvious advice to “be interesting”, Louise Doherty provides a useful rule-of-thumb for giving your tweets the best chances of being retweeted, hinging on the length of the tweet and some ethereal “interestingness” factor.

The maximum length of a Twitter message is 140 characters, therefore the length of your tweets should be 140 — [length of your username + 5]; the 5 additional characters account for the addition of ‘RT’, ‘@’, and corresponding spaces.

For example, my (JohnSomerton) maximum tweet length would be 123 characters in order to allow space for someone retweeting to pre-pend it with ‘RT @JohnSomerton’.

As an aside, anyone want to posit a mathematical formula for “Twitter Interestingness”?  Would make for a great blog post!

How I got my blog post retweeted by @problogger, @GuyKawasaki and 250 more by Marko Saric

In this post Marko Saric talks about how he got his Top 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins blog post to go viral using Twitter.

The key takeaways from his post (above and beyond what is already been discussed here) are mainly to do with being a little more “proactive” in promoting your blog to the Twittersphere.  His strategy of directly targeting other influential Twitter-ers is particularly interesting, and the entire post is well worth reading.

The Science Behind Viral Tweets and Getting ReTweeted

Now that you generally know how to get retweeted, digging in to the scientific intricacies of what works best and why it all works will definitely help take you to the next level of Twitter stardom.

Dan Zarrella is the indisputable guru of viral messaging on Twitter, and takes a very methodical and scientific approach to dissecting Twitter dynamics.  I highly recommend you just go and subscribe to his RSS feed, but if you’re not quite ready to make that kind of a commitment to Dan, at least read these few posts!

The Science of ReTweets by Dan Zarrella

What’s in a Retweet?  The Data Behind Viral Messaging on Twitter by Dan Zarrella

How ReTweets Spread: The Epidemiology of Viral Messaging on Twitter by Dan Zarrella

At some point in the future I may also include a section here on Social Psychology since social dynamics are so fundamental to Twitter and social media in general.  For the time being though, I’ll just recommend that you go out and buy Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Read it.  Then read it again.  Then again.  It is that good.

So there you have it, some of the best minds in the blogosphere on the art and science of getting retweeted. These were the best posts and thoughts I could find at the time of writing this, but if you know of a great blog post that deserves to be on this list, please let us know in the comments below.

And if you liked this post, please feel free to retweet it – thanks!

In what ways might the SEO industry (as a whole) respond to issues of fear and lack of trust in selecting an SEO provider?

The many responses to the first question vary, but the one consistency is that there is always an underlying tone of negativity in the answers due to an obvious huge lack of trust in the SEO industry.

I think the overarching issue being brought to light by this is that SEO is in demand, but clients are leery to undertake SEO due to a perceived inability to separate the legitimate experts from the “snake oil salesmen” (a term that gets used more in the context of SEO than almost any other field I can think of).

I’d like to know your thoughts on how the SEO industry can somehow regulate itself and in the process help those in need find a legitimate and trustworthy provider.

One idea that comes to mind is some sort of certification, licensing, or accreditation body.

In the engineering field (at least in Canada) in order to authorize and approve building plans (for example), a person must be a registered and licensed professional member of the province’s association of professional engineers (e.g. in Ontario that is the Professional Engineers of Ontario – PEO). This then allows them to use the legal designation of P.Eng.  In order to become a P.Eng, you must have verifiable training and experience under another P.Eng for a certain number of years, and have graduated with an engineering degree from an accredited engineering program.

SEO may certainly not entail the public safety issues involved in engineering, medicine, and other such professions, but in my opinion it is a field that, in the delivery of services, is more technically-oriented than it is marketing-oriented, and could certainly benefit from an independent overseer.

What would you like to see in the SEO industry? How have you seen these issues overcome in other industries? Let me know your thoughts.

But just today, the rumours started becoming a little closer to reality with Apple’s job posting for, yes, a Genius.

What does Apple’s Genius have to do with SEO?

Plenty.  When your advertised job titles are the usual, boring, same-old-same-old, you’re not going to attract much attention now are you?

So why not spice up your job titles a bit, no, a lot? I mean really make them sizzle. 

Make them so tantalizing that people will want to Twitter, Email, IM, blog about, and otherwise link to your job ads, just because they’re so intriguing, silly, sexy, unconventional, or outrageous.

Pure viral linkbait from something as simple as a job title and description – now that’s genius.

How about you – are you still running boring job ads?  Even if you wanted to, could your organization make the change and the committment to be a little more interesting?

In case you didn’t know, Basecamp is an online project management and collaboration tool, built on the Ruby on Rails framework. It’s slick, simple and intuitive to use, and an inexpensive solution to client communication and management for SEO projects.

Why I Like Basecamp for SEO Project Management and Collaboration

To really reap the benefits of SEO, it needs to be looked at as a process of continuous improvement, not a one-time fix-it-all project.  Sure, you can get a lot done in the context of a fixed scope project, but to gain the insights and traction on the search engines to take you to the top it really needs to be a collaborative and ongoing process – and that’s where Basecamp shines.

In my approach to SEO, I take a collaborative and transparent approach with my clients.  There is no black magic (or black-hatting for that matter) involved.  Rather I see it as a two-way street requiring open communications and accountability from both client and SEO provider.

Basecamp it turns out, while somewhat lightweight on traditional project management features (it will not replace MS Project), makes a fantastic collaboration tool for agile projects.  The beauty is in its simplicity. And because it’s a hosted solution, is easily accessible by anyone on the project team via a web browser.

If you’re looking for an excellent collaboration tool to keep your internal projects on track or to help in communicating with external consultants on your web development or SEO projects, I suggest you give Basecamp a try!

I just finished playing around with this interesting site featured on Startup Ottawa and created by Jordan Boesch called Taxi Me.

Taxi Me is a neat tool that mashes up Google Maps with cab fare estimation to let you estimate the cost of a cab ride from point A to point B. Nice business model as well – local cab companies simply pay a monthly fee for ad placement in one of three listings.

Taxi Me as a Decision Tool

After playing around with it a bit, it got me thinking: why would I need to use this site in a real world situation?

With cab fares typically being standardized by the city, Taxi Me in its current form allows me to decide whether I should:

• Take a taxi OR a bus (or other public transportation)
• Take a taxi OR drive
• Take a taxi OR walk, run, bike, hitchhike
• Just stay put!

In other words, TaxiMe helps answer the question: “Is taking a taxi an economical solution to my current transportation problem?” An important question for many, and kudos to Jordan for creating such a slick tool to address it.

So now that I’m taking a taxi, which one should I call? Does it even matter?

In general, it usually doesn’t matter which company you call – they’re all kind of the same really.  But should it?  I think yes!

When you think about it, a cab ride is really just a commodity.  It’s a means to an end, and with rates being fixed by the city there leaves little room for standouts and innovators in the taxi industry.

So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an online service to broker and auction off cab rides? Kind of an online market for cab rides and maybe even other commodity-like services.

It would operate similar to the way Google AdWords auctions off ad positions on search engine results pages.  A ride seeker would enter start and destination points (the query) just like they do with Taxi Me, and then local taxi companies would compete for a position in the listings (and therefore the fare) based on three factors:

1. their bid for the fare
2. the availability of a cab at the time requested
3. an independently assessed “quality score” of the cab company (perhaps based on user reviews)

Has this already been done?  Could it be done or is the industry too over-regulated to get something like this off the ground? Let me know your thoughts.

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