[Sigia-l] SEO versus Experience design versus usability

[Marianne]

Good Evening All,

It has been a long quiet for me as I've had little to contribute until now.
Search Optimization has been a primary focus for me over the last few
months. My approach is to play to the strengths of the technology. 

Optimization means to construct content that is "assessable by the
technology." Search starts as simple pattern matching. Retrieve all of the
pages that have words that match the query term(s). Then run a bunch of
algorithms that always include some form of PageRank [now with calculations
far in excess of the number of incoming links] to sort into some approximate
of relevance. Link farms don't work any longer because search technology now
does a "comparison" of the content from the page linking in. Keyword
stuffing doesn't work because the search technology now has an "acceptable"
ratio of keywords to total content. There are other forms of "black hat"
optimization and the search engines update their technology to combat them. 

For information architecture, the critical changes involve site structure.
Google, and other search engines, have migrated [or are going to] the
Authoritative Sources model articulated by James Kleinberg.
[http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/kleinberg99authoritative.html]. Here an
additional relevance score is distributed based on pages that are deemed to
be an "authority" on the query term. 

I'll hope to delve deeper into this subject in a presentation that I'm
submitted to the IA Summit on SEO from the IA perspective. Until then, here
are some good rules.

Write clean code: This means have solid meta data that includes a
descriptive title that includes keywords [aim for 6-9 words maximum],
Description meta data that concisely describes the destination, keywords
[yes, some say they are worthless and I say they cannot hurt and could
likely help] that do not exceed 150 characters and are tailored to the
content on the page.

The more shallow the site structure, the better: Some search technologies
are pursuing a "click-distance" method that deems pages further down the
directory as "less relevant."

Pay attention to links: The links that you solicit should come from sites
that are similar in nature to yours. Do not "dead end" your visitor. Give
them transportation to another page, a related page.

Assist the search spider: Submit a Google site map as well as verify your
site with Google. Yahoo! refers to this as authentication and I recommend
doing the same there. You'll find more information about this process [it's
easy] in the Webmaster section of each.

For me the most important is to remember that this technology is pretty
smart and getting smarter by the week if the technology patents are to be
believed. I believe them; I'm seeing some of the handiwork on the major
search engines today. 

Marianne Sweeny
Daedalus Information Systems
"Find it faster."

Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 22:43:51 -0700
From: Skot Nelson <skot at penguinstorm.com>
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] SEO versus Experience design versus usability
To: SIGIA-L l <sigia-l at asis.org>

On Oct-5-2006, at 21:34 , Eric Reiss wrote:

> I also had to sometimes create content that really wasn't necessary
> for the user in any context I could conceive, but that supported our
> desired search engine rankings.

> I really hope you're referring to metadata and not something a site
> visitor actually sees.

In fairness, better written content does "search" better. If this is  
what's being described, I'd see it as a good thing.

I do generally subscribe to the "less is more" school so would agree  
with the principle that adding pages purely for search is a bit silly,
--
Skot Nelson

	"In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when
	 there is no longer anything to add, but when there
	 is no longer anything to take away."
	-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars