Tough times for lifestyle, on and off line. Isn’t that what got us in trouble? - the headlines scream - Too much style, too little life! From now on, we’re all going to be lean, mean, green machines… and, we need stuff to prove it!

The end of consumerism is nowhere near in sight. What we are facing is a shift in consumers’ behavior, not the most pleasant one but, still a shift. Different groups will start buying different products, at a different pace, in different quantities (who knew a 20-lb bag of rice will be a must-have item!).

Capturing Imagination Online

Now that the argument of the impending doom of commerce is out of the way, let’s concentrate on the topic: the inherent limitations of online lifestyling.

• Whisk me Away

The goal of lifestyle marketing is to entice us to buy products and services that are partially or completely unnecessary, designed to improve such a nebulous thing as quality of life. It relies on its ability to take us into a different realm, where everything is just the way it should be. By evoking all those “priceless” moments (no need to say, with a very real price tag attached) such marketing expertly pushes our emotional buttons.

• When Dreaming, Dream Big

Television and print as fully controllable media still rule with their immersive powers. We are easily pulled in by a glossy magazine photo; a large screen HDTV, usually paired with a cushy sofa, is downright hypnotic. When it comes to the web, the fact that we are sitting in front of a computer busily clicking our way around, makes it seem a lot more like work than leisure - and often it is, since a good portion of web surfing happens at work.

• It Takes (at least) Two for Synergy

Big established lifestyle brands see the Internet as a natural extension of their TV and print marketing strategies. Their websites, more or less, have a complementing role of information and purchasing centers. Most of the shopper-wooing happens before they reach the web. What about pure online vendors and content providers with no such luxury? How do they capture people’s imagination in a fast-paced, interactive medium with so many technical prerequisites and variables?

• Dazed and Confused

Except for video games, a deeper emotional involvement is all but impossible in an environment where information is ground to the consistency of raw sugar with every grain competing for attention. Quality and size of the imagery are commensurate with space and connection limitations. An old monitor or a finicky browser can make even the slickest web designs look like crumpled old brochures. Flash adds movement but, when overdone, the loading drum roll announcing something spectacular is going to spoil the surprise.

The problem is further exacerbated by the multifunctional nature of online entities. My store is my ad and my ad is my store; my blog is my newsletter; my flyer puts products in shopping carts; my portal is all of the above, etc. Speaking of interactivity: my customers’ thought processes in wording search terms are my site’s neon lights that light up only when asked for! Now, who’s pushing the buttons here?

• The Power of Bling

Boiled down, all we have to work with are pictures and words (aka content). For a start, raising the overall production quality of graphics, photos and videos, not just their resolution, might help. We all know the importance of lighting in creating an atmosphere and depth (one of the reasons magazines are printed on shiny paper) yet, light is sorely missing in web presentations. Finding a way to introduce light as a design element is a challenge worthy of exploring.

• A McMansion You Can Afford

There is a notion that web design should display the entire content and give answers to every potential inquiry right off the bat. This led to perceived real estate shortages when in fact there is unlimited space on the web. People don’t mind clicking, they mind being lost. De-cluttering and taking firmer control of the information flow is the next task to achieve. According to the web’s construction code, any and every door can be an entry door. No need for visitors to feel like they snuck in through the utility closet, greet them with fanfare regardless of where they came in.

• Digital Sweet-Talking

And last but not least, when images are lacking, words need to pick up the slack. A new breed of copywriters is required to fuse computer sciences and behavioral linguistics with an aphoristic style of writing suited for a medium suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder (by the way, the style quite the opposite of the one I just used to introduce it). As Hippocrates said in his own aphorism many moons ago: Life is short, art is long.

On that note, I’ll let you go on with your life(style).

While search engine optimization concerns are the focus here, there are many different applications of information architecture (IA) that go beyond search engines. IA overlaps with several other disciplines, including navigability, user experience, and interface design. It’s very hard to speak categorically about this subject, because how IA is applied to a site is based largely on business goals, the site infrastructure, user testing, and the whims of the people involved (for real).

At its most fundamental, however, information architecture is about organizing digital inventories so they’re easily understood by robots and human beings.

I normally wouldn’t want to focus only on the SEO side of site architecture, because it leaves out the end user (and so much more). When providing site architecture recommendations, we work with interface designers and (sometimes) a usability engineer, in addition to the development team. We’ll have the results of their usability testing and can balance that with SEO goals. This topic is complex. Like SEO, information architecture seeps into every aspect of web production.

Recently Magnus Brättemark posted a question in the LED Digest about site architecture for multilingual sites. I’m going to incorporate some of my response to that post here since this is a frequent topic of discussion. It also speaks to the complexities inherent in multi-national site architectures.

Finally, we’ll touch on findability (again) and how it (perhaps) takes us into the realms of IA in a way that SEO simply cannot. I’m still not convinced findability is the Holy Grail, but I’m becoming more interested in its role, especially how it dovetails with other important factors that make up the web ecology: from information retrieval to usability.

Enough rambling. Let’s get started!

What is Information Architecture? Definitions

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” - Winston Churchill

In the classic work in the field, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Peter Morville defines information architecture this way:

in•for•ma•tion ar•chi•tec•ture n.

1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within web sites and intranets.
3. The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability.
4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Four unique definitions, all of them rather hard to hold on to. This encapsulates IA and indicates how theoretical it is. However, it also shows us its flexibility and kinship to SEO: we can define it any number of ways. In its best form, SEO has much in common with IA, which is why most of the best search marketers are deeply skilled in site architecture.

A simpler definition for our purposes:

Information architecture is the semantic structure and organization of digital inventories.

With SEO, we care primarily about delivering relevant content to the spiders in a format that they can easily digest and understand, but we also care about making it usable, credible, attractive, and high-quality. SEO like IA has to be part of every aspect of web production, from the initial strategic planning phase to the on-going preservation of rankings and expansion of content.

We don’t create sites for search engines, we create sites for people. Balancing the needs of a spider with the needs of your visitor is a critical distinction.

While SEO (and IA for that matter) is not necessarily about design, a deep understanding of usability and interface design principles, with empirical data from testing, will pay large dividends (read: cold hard cash) from improvements in relevance, conversion rates and meritocratic sharing by site visitors. It’s all tied together.

Pieces of the IA Puzzle

A site’s architecture is built by domains, sections, categories, pages and media (to name but a few). A description of each one of these follows:

Domains: The top level domain (TLD), which can have within it multiple sub-domains.
Sections: These represent the organizational hubs where categories (and sometimes other sections) are located.
Categories: These represent organizational reference points for pages and media (and sometimes other categories).
Pages: Web documents in the form of whatever language - xHTML, PHP, ASP, etc. and either static or dynamic (or a combination).
Media: Images, videos, documents (such as PDFs), sound files, etc.

Of course, this is a simplified treatment of a site’s structure, but it’s accurate enough for our purposes.

Optimized IA: Domains

Domain names are a critical asset that communicates volumes to users early in the searching process. We see your domain name in the SERPs, we see it in print, we hear it spoken. A good domain name can literally make (or break) a site - it’s critically important from a marketing perspective.

From an architectural perspective, there are a number of concerns we need to keep in mind. The domain name is the foundation that supports the entire web property. Take care that the following best practices are built into this foundation:

• Semantic Value: a domain with your primary keyword is a very good thing, but it shouldn’t be the total focus. It’s likely a keyword in the domain (and to a lesser extent, the URL) will score additional relevance points, provided the topical theme of the site matches closely. But it also needs to be short and memorable (or long and memorable, if you can get away with it). It needs to be easy to share with others vocally, and it should reflect your market position or brand. Beware of too many dashes in the domain, as these tend to lower credibility since they’ve been abused so heavily by spammers. Generally speaking, a shorter URL tends to raise credibility because of their higher value and scarcity.

• Canonicalization: with the increased sophistication of search engines (especially Google), concerns about duplicate content will become less and less pronounced. But it’s still important, and always a best practice, to rewrite URLs so a “www” and root domain don’t both display the same content. With Google, it’s likely all you’ll need to do is specificy a preference between the canonicals in your Webmaster Tools console. However, ensure this is built into your site architecture so other search engines don’t hiccup on the duplicates. This also helps ensure consistency among backlinks, since it controls what versions of a URL are likely to be found (and cited), and it simplifies internal linking.

• Additional Canonicalization Concerns: besides basic URL canonicalization, there are other scenarios where a site can get in trouble. For example, older versions of IIS use a 302 meta refresh to display a trailing slash on pages entered without one. This is easily solved with something like the ISAPI rewrite tool.

You’ll also want to ensure there’s consistency in the internal linking of your site. Some content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla! will create multiple versions of pages and link to them with multiple URLs within the site. The Joomla! issue is especially bad with their frontpage treatment, which can create dozens of different home pages, each of which gets linked from various sections of the site. Ensure you link to your pages using a standardized rule, and stick to it.

• Crawling Errors: within Google Webmaster Tools, you can monitor your site for crawling errors and export any results to CSV for analysis and repair. You should also periodically crawl your site with a tool like Xenu (or something more powerful, but you’ll have to roll-your-own) to verify link integrity within your site and more.

Excessive 404 errors can cause ranking penalties at Google, so it’s something you’ll want to monitor.

• Redirects: there is an art and science to properly redirecting expired, non-existent, or relocated pages. In general, you’ll want to make wide use of 301 permanent redirects in cases where a) the page has moved to a new location, b) visitors are likely to be confused or frustrated by a 404 error page, c) another page closely matches the content of the expired or deleted page. 302 temporary redirects are also used widely, but don’t pass PageRank the way 301s do, and should only be used in specific cases (such as browser look-ups). There are good uses of redirects, and there are bad uses. We’ll talk about some of each in a future article.

For now, just remember the golden rule: is it good for the visitor? In many cases, 301′ing an entire site is NOT good for the visitor, it’s good for the site owner hoping to cash in on accumulated PageRank (and thus an entire strategy has been built up to acquire sites and redirect them for these purposes). In general, permanently redirecting a site in whole may not have as much benefit as you’d think it would. Sometimes it’s best to test by redirecting a few pages first, and sometimes it’s best to leave the site in place for a specific duration of time (6 months, a year) with a message about future changes. And yes, sometimes it’s best to leave the site intact and build it out separately.

• Domain Registration: registering your domain name for the maximum duration (10 years) may give an additional quality award from Google, who is a registrar for quality control reasons (or big brother snooping, depending on whom you ask).

• Multilingual Domain Structure: there are a few ways to handle sites that are created for different countries and languages. The first and best method is to create country-specific TLDs with unique sites and content. Localization is critical - ensure your Spain site has language specific to Spain, and not Mexico. The second method, inferior to the first, is to create sub-domains for each language version. The third method, least desirable of all, is to create a directory structure serving each language. In the case of the latter, make sure you name your directories using the language of the country you’re serving. There’s nothing more annoying than being a native of Germany and having to navigate to www.domain.com/german/index.html instead of www.domain.com/deutsch/index.html.

The first method has many benefits, including the ability to authenticate the domain in Google Webmaster Tools and specify the geo-location. International TLDs will be indexed and listed in language-specific versions of search engines and regional directories, when many sub-domains and directory localization strategies will not.

To bring it all together, serve an international hub page (or small site) with a version selector for each country-specific domain. This helps with spidering and enables users to individually select the version of your site they’re interested in using. A browser detection script gives your visitors less control - don’t rely on the browser language to serve the language version. This also does away with the 302 redirect commonly deployed for browser look-ups.

Optimized IA: Sections & Categories

Now we get into sections and categories, the pillars and columns of our structure. You’ll hear these areas of a site referred to in lots of different ways - as hubs, doorways and hallways for instance - but the basic idea is the same. These are the areas of a site that bridge the root domain with key individual pages of content. Or more precisely, sections and categories provide entry points into deeper content that allow for comprehensive crawling of a site’s hierarchy.

Since the root domain on a site won’t rank for nearly as many terms as its sub-pages, these represent the spidering gateway into your money pages. As you build an optimized information architecture, remember that these interior sections of a site feed much of the ranking power of the domain, and represent the bulk of its potential traffic. This is long-tail paradise.

We mentioned the idea of topical themes above in the section on domain names. Themes are an important aspect of IA and govern things like applying keyword research to labeling and navigation, but they also dictate strategies for assembling sections and categories topically. A site hierarchy can be visually represented nicely in something like Visio or OmniGraffle, and they can get pretty complex.

There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but in general search engines weigh content directly below the root domain with more value than deeper pages. Think about it: pages one level deep tend to be pretty important. That’s why, after all these years and the continued sophistication of search algorithms, it can still be effective to create static HTML pages and publish them in the root directory.

When thinking about how to lay out your site hierarchy, consider taking your core keyword list and chunking it into groups. These groups will represent the basic sections of the site, and each one should be optimized with keyword messaging. Below these sections are the finer category keyword sets you’re targeting, with pages (or more categories) within those. And so on. You may need to only go two or three levels deep, or you may need to get much more complex. The construction of site hierarchy is strongly dependent on the market and business goals (and the SEO benefits of specific keyword markets).

When assembling your keyword list to build the sections of your site, use the Google AdWords keyword tool which automatically creates good keyword groupings. You may need to filter some of the results, which you can dump directly into a file for compilation and research with other keyword lists.

A post about creating site themes written by Brett Tabke in early 2001 visualizes this arrangement quite well. Without getting into internal linking strategies (which we’ll cover below), the idea is to funnel spiders from the keyword-themed sections downward to well-targeted interior pages. Then, instead of linking across from section to section (and category to category), you link vertically to and from the keyword-matched theme pages. This strategy was developed long before nofollow was in the common SEO vernacular, but maximizes internal PageRank in much the same way by controlling how spiders crawl through a site following its links.

There’s no right way to set up a site’s hierarchy, and a lot depends on the site’s size. Zappos is going to have a far different strategy than Bastyr for example. But the basic concept is to build core section and category themes that funnel spiders (and PageRank) to deeper pages. We’ll cover this in more detail below, in the section on internal linking.

Optimized IA: Pages

Standards-compliant and clean code has never been more important. As the web evolves, search engines will become less patient with messy, broken markup. Imagine a web where high-quality content is no longer a scarcity (we’re getting there); where standards-compliant code is the rule rather than the exception (nope, not there yet); and where websites will be counted in the trillions rather than billions (we there yet?). By creating clean code and semantically optimized pages, you’re helping spiders to quickly crawl and understand a page.

This is the area of SEO that’s becoming the first real standard. It’s not complicated to build well-optimized pages. Here are the basics.

• Semantic Structure: good semantic markup is a must for spiders. It enables for efficient crawling and indexing of pages by serving content in a form that’s easy for spiders to understand. The basics of W3C compliant code should be followed: relevant and optimized title tags kept under 70 characters, descriptive meta descriptions, relevant header tags that echo or subtly modify the title tag and then narrow the focus with subsequent tags, and wise use of bulleted and numbered lists, bolding, and emphasis. Be sure to do away with deprecated tags such as < b > as well.

• Metadata: a word about the meta keyword tag: Google still uses this for targeting contextual ads in AdSense (apparently), and there’s a strong chance it’s still used by Yahoo! for their search algorithm (but probably not much). Feel free to add 3 or 4 keyword modifiers here, but don’t put much time into it. Often the meta keyword tag is abused by design and developer teams. If there are problems with departments in your company misusing it, remove the keyword field altogether in your CMS. As Bob Porter from Office Space says,

We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.

• Standards: if possible, design your code to conform to W3C standards. Standards compliant code is cool, sure, but it also aids search crawlers and can help with SEO efforts. How much? Hard to say. I feel strongly that standards-compliant code is a high water mark we should all strive to achieve. Is it critical? Definitely not. Is it professional? Absolutely.

• Accessibility: search engines care about accessibility, so be sure to include descriptive alternate text attributes on all images. This allows users with screen readers to understand what the pages are about, but it also gives you an additional field to propogate with text. Provided the text is relevant to the image and the page’s content, it can help in SEO efforts.

• Code: keep javascript in includes and CSS files external. Be sure to have a high content to code ratio in pages with ranking potential, and try to keep content high in the source code.

• Content: natural, high-quality writing is best. Avoid keyword-stuffed copy, it turns people off and probably isn’t as effective as natural writing anyway. Use keyword modifiers in the copy, if it makes sense and flows, to help draw in long-tail searches.

• Orphan Pages: since crawlers like Xenu work by following links, they won’t be able to locate any orphan pages (pages not linked internally anywhere on your site). To find these pages, you’ll need a use a custom java or CGI script. Within Google Webmaster Tools, you may try looking at the internal link report for any pages with 5 links or less. If pages you care about are only being linked to once or twice, do something about it! Generally speaking, more internal links into a page gives it more importance and potential ranking power.

• Media: as I already mentioned, descriptive ALT attributes should be on image files. Images should also (ideally) have descriptive file names and relevant text surrounding them or near them. Videos should have relevant keywords in their titles, be transcribed with text on the page, and have their metadata information filled out properly.

Optimized IA: Internal Linking

Creating a well-optimized internal linking strategy is an art. Think about the factors involved using Google’s algorithm as the example:

1. Each site and each page has a certain amount of PageRank. We have no idea how much that is. We don’t even really know what PageRank is!
2. We have no real idea about how much PageRank a site or page has - we can only guess.
3. We have no idea how much PageRank fluctuates.

With the above points made, there are some things you can do. As always, take great care you know what you’re getting into before deploying nofollow on a site. You could be doing far more damage than you know.

• Basic Linking: ideally you’ll be able to link to all the important sections from the home page. The main index page will likely possess the most PageRank, and is the natural entry point for search spiders. Providing plain text links to each important section of the site is critical. You’ll also want to create an HTML sitemap as an additional spider crawling area, and have it linked directly off the home page (and sitewide).

• Deep Linking: link to important sub-categories and specific pages from the home page, or directly under the home page if that’s not possible.

• Anchor Text: anchor text matters with internal links too. Ensure you link to keyword-optimized pages with the relevant anchor text. You want your money phrase in the link text and on the page it links to. Sounds simple, but you’d be amazed at how often this is messed up! People tend to think, “if I link to this page with the right anchor text I’m done” and forget that the page has to be keyword optimized too. It’s a head-slapper, I know.

• Basic Nofollow: if your site has sitewide links to the privacy policy or terms of service pages, consider adding the rel='nofollow' attribute to the internal links. You may also nofollow pages that require a login, such as the shopping cart and account profile links. For pages with over 100 links, you’ll want to carefully sculpt with nofollow to concentrate the amount of PageRank flowing off the page. Dan Thies has a fantastic explanation of PageRank sculpting:

If you think of every link on your site as a valve that pushes some PageRank on to the next page, nofollow simply lets you turn some valves off. This increases the amount of PageRank flowing through the remaining links.

• Link Threshholds: any page with over 150 links is a waste in terms of usability and internal linking, so split your sitemaps into multiples if you have thousands of pages (note the sub-domain being deployed there). In general, less links on a page mean more PageRank is available for the links present. Keep this in mind with your homepage, because that tends to have the most PageRank to spend and we like to use it for linking to everything under the sun.

• Advanced Bot Herding: first a warning: don’t implement major nofollow sculpting unless you know what you’re doing. Thies calls this technique the third level push. The strategy uses the following general methodology to flow more PageRank to deeper pages:

1. Sitewide links are nofollowed. This in effect removes their greedy pull on internal PageRank from the site, where overhead pages (such as a privacy policy, TOS, and contact page) tend to get linked to heavily yet don’t have a monetization role. You’ll still want these indexed (probably), so don’t exclude them with a meta tag or in your robots.txt - nofollow them instead.

2. Second tier pages (what we’ve discussed as sections and/or categories) that have links to each other (other second tier pages) and the home page (upwards in the site hierarchy) are given nofollows. This allows more PageRank to flow deeper to third tier pages.

3. Third tier pages that link upwards to second-tier pages have those links nofollowed. This gives them more PageRank to pass along the third tier.

Halfdeck applies this method slightly differently and also cites some useful explanatory quotes from Thies. Halfdeck also explains advanced linking strategies such as paired and circular linking on the second and third tier.

The basic idea behind this method is to force more PageRank to flow downwards from the home page to deeper pages of the site. With more PageRank granted, these deeper pages will be indexed by Google (the engine this technique specifically targets), thus giving you more money pages in the main index.

You’ll want to make use of Halfdeck’s PageRankBot tool, which can provide a shortcut to diagnosing PageRank leaks and making smart use of nofollow. Here’s detailed information about using this tool. You’ll need some basic geek chops to get this installed, but it’s well worth the effort!

For the sake of completion, some other terms you’ll hear this technique referred to are siloing from Bruce Clay’s team, and dynamic linking from Dan Thies. That should take care of your reading material for the next week or so.

There are normally far more important steps to take on a site than manipulating internal PageRank. Most sites will benefit by implementing a basic nofollow strategy for overhead pages, but that’s as far as you’ll probably need to go. Techniques like the third level push should be reserved for advanced SEO when indexing (and ranking) goals have been largely achieved, or for sites without many external links pointing at deeper pages and an imbalance of PageRank on the root domain. By and large it’s far more important (and effective) to work on adding great content to a site’s deep pages and building PageRank that way.

Optimized IA: Final Considerations

Below is a collection of assorted recommendations that I haven’t mentioned yet.

• Keywords in URLs: use keywords in your folder paths and filenames, and hyphens to separate them. When all other factors are equal, a relevancy score can be won by having additional semantic value in the URL.

• XML Sitemaps: you may consider using an XML sitemap. I haven’t found any major benefit except when moving a site or trying to get a substantial amount of pages (over 25,000) crawled (but not necessarily indexed - they don’t appear to give any advantage here). You can add the sitemap directive to your robots.txt file. Make sure your XML structure is clean and you haven’t included URL errors or pages you don’t want crawled.

• 404 Error Pages: custom 404 error pages give visitors confidence in a site, add credibility, and help to keep them on your site. There are a number of best practices to take, such as:

1. keeping choices to a minimum. Treat your error page like a simplified landing page - don’t overwhelm a user with choices. They’re lost, they need a minimum of feedback to get them back on track.

2. put clear call-to-action links to the sitemap and main categories of your site.

3. put a search box on the 404 page.

4. ensure your 404 returns the correct server header code.

5. consider asking for feedback on what page they were trying to find; you won’t get many takers, but some will let you know. You can use that information to redirect non-existent pages or find other errors in the site.

• Excluding Content: use the robots.txt file to exclude content and sections of your site from robots. For specific pages, you can also add a meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" to the head section to exclude that page. There are many other combinations as well. In general, you’ll want to ensure administrative sections of the site are excluded from all bots, and content sections are left spiderable. It used to be a common practice to exclude the /images directory in robots.txt, but I normally don’t recommend doing so. Google Image search has the capability to send significant traffic to your site, and with blended search results images are even showing up in the web results.

• No ODP: if you’ve been lucky enough to get a listing in DMOZ, you’ll want to add the meta name="robots" content="noodp" tag to force Google, MSN and Yahoo! to ignore the title and description summaries in your ODP listings. All three search engines now should properly behave in this regard. Google has famously used all sorts of combinations of ODP entries in various titles and snippets, so this can be an important step to take if your site isn’t optimized in Google results.

• Other Meta Tags: get rid of any extraneous meta tags, such as meta name="robots" content="Index, Follow". It’s useless.

Conclusions: How Findability Fits In

This article is about information architecture from an SEO perspective. It mostly leaves out the concepts of usability and design (on purpose). Using the strategies listed here will help sites get crawled quicker, and give search engines a more accurate understanding of what a site is about. Ultimately (provided off-page factors are covered well), that will lead to more pages in the search indexes and higher rankings.

So what about findability, which I alluded to in the beginning of the article? (I know… way up there near the top.) Well, I believe findability is important where the promotion of user-centric and relevant content in the SERPs is the primary focus, rather than commercial intent. Companies that can marry a user-centric relevance with marketing goals will have a distinct advantage. The challenge (and the upside) is bringing these SEO recommendations into the process and balancing them with usability, branding, conversion goals and design. It’s fantastically complex, but it can be done.

Words matter. So why do the words that describe internet marketing suck so bad?

This article explores the reputation problem the search engine optimization industry faces because of shortcomings in the language used to describe it. This is a difficult topic, and probably too theoretical for some. But since my last post on the Fundamentals of Link Building was so practical, I thought I should balance that out.

One footnote: you’ll notice throughout this article, I use a variety of terms interchangeably to describe internet marketing. Yes, I do realize the irony of this; I’ve done it on purpose. It reveals just how fuzzy this topic can be.

Internet Marketing: Defined by the Definer

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Thus penned the philospher Wittgenstein in his 1922 work on the symbolism and nuance of language. Well, I’m nowhere near as smart as old Ludwig, but his quote fits well in our discussion of the language used to describe internet marketing. (I’m sure Ludwig could never have guessed his philosophy would be co-opted for such a relatively elementary topic as this. Sorry dude.)

But let’s get to the gettin’, shall we?

I prefer the term internet marketing to describe what I do professionally, but I also use terms such as search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) - often interchangeably. Then there’s the term search marketing (which needs no acronym at all) which I tend to favor for more general usage. But that doesn’t work in all situations, because it still limits the scope of thinking to search.

Sometimes I use the term web strategy to define what we do. But it might be too vague, even though it does a good job of enveloping the many facets of web business we’re concerned with.

And recently, I’ve begun studying usability and information architecture in depth, and have developed a fondness for the term findability. More on that later.

As you can see, I use several different terms to describe my profession. And there’s very little rhyme or reason as to why - it’s as much about what fits into the conversation as anything else. I’ve noticed this is true for a lot of people in our industry, who tend to use labels for their work based on personal inclinations or the group-think mentality; there’s very little consistency, and there’s very little explanation (and often very little thought).

The Scope of Internet Marketing Disciplines

By and large, the internet marketing industry has been labeled using terms that aren’t well defined, such as “SEO.” Yet there’s a crucial difference between search marketing and internet marketing.

Some SEO is about conversion optimization. Other SEO is social media, online PR, or link building. Some SEO is basic on-page semantic optimization - Mike Grehan’s “text book SEO” (and good luck to them). The problem with the term search engine optimization is that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. SEO has gotten complex, and the profession has outgrown its label and needs better definition.

So let’s attempt to define internet marketing:

Internet marketing is the strategic promotion of online properties in order to drive awareness, visibility, targeted traffic and conversions, using a variety of communication channels.

That’s my attempt, it’s not very good, but thankfully there are many others.

I like this one:

The application of the internet and related digital technologies to achieve marketing objectives.

And I also like this one:

Leveraging the Internet as a means of communicating a company’s messaging, attracting prospects and customers, and conducting market research.

It’s evident by these definitions that internet marketing is a wide topic encompassing many different disciplines. Here are just a few:

• SEO: to achieve search engine visibility and traffic, to capture markets and to drive leads via search.
• Email: to remarket to your customer base, to build brand loyalty and convert existing customers repeatedly.
• PR: to syndicate news across multiple sources, to build awareness
• Social Media: to engage a community in discussions
• Community: to build a community base within your online properties
• Analytics: to study data in order to provide outcomes that will empower decisions
• Usability: to create a site that’s easy to use and enjoyable, in order to retain repeat visitors
• Information Architecture: to build a site methodically for intuitive navigation and to ease crawling and indexing by search spiders
• Link Building: to maximize traffic, awareness and search rankings through the solicitation of link citations
• Web Design & Development: to create a web application, to create web designs, for the purpose of maximizing the conversion potential of a targeted lead
• Paid Search Marketing: to deploy paid advertising campaigns across major search engines and content networks.

And many more…

There are many different ways to skin a cat when it comes to promoting a website, and there are professionals working in each of the areas above (and many more) that mostly define themselves by the same moniker: SEO.

Therein lies a forked-tongue serpent:

1. SEO is used widely as the general term for all things marketing online, yet it represents only a single aspect of what internet marketing entails.

2. SEO has a reputation for being dirty and evil, the realm of snake oil and cheaters.

The SEO Image Problem

The design community envisions SEO as a sketchy uncle who binds the innocent orphan findability and forces upon him a steady diet of keywords.

Information architects and usability professionals normally regard SEO as the myopic step-child of web development and design, a (necessary) nuisance but only secondary to the “real” disciplines essential to web strategy. Per Jakob Nielsen:

The importance of good page titles and summaries goes far beyond traditional search engine optimization (SEO) and its narrow focus on getting a high GYM rating (that is, a high ranking on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search listings).

Some high-profile bloggers like Jason Calacanis and mainstream news sources like the New York Times regard SEO as dirty and evil, and like to portray those who practice it as cheaters. Examples from Calacanis are numerous (if disingenuous, they’re probably more about attention than truth), but you’d expect more from the NYT than comments like this:

To those in the trade, outsmarting the algorithm is called “search engine optimization.” For the rest of us, it produces Web pages littered with spam.

So why all this negative attention? What’s so slimy about SEO? That’s a difficult question to answer.

The Concept of Findability

I mentioned Aarron Walter’s excellent article above. In it, Walter raises awareness about findability - adding yet another concept (and label) into the already confused arena of online marketing terminology. (Online marketing - there’s another one. Sorry, I promise I’ll stop.)

Findability, Walter writes,

… is a very good boy with a big heart for helping people find the websites they seek, find content within websites, and rediscover valuable content they’d found. He used his arsenal of talent for planning, writing, coding, and analysis to create websites that could connect with a target audience.

… which is synonymous with proper internet marketing - ethical strategies that work to establish relevant content in prominent locations on search engines, social media sites, news sources, and other sites of all kinds.

SEO is the Real Orphan

Like usability, search engine optimization requires no professional credentials or licensing. Anyone who wishes to claim the title of “SEO” may do so, and take payment for their services (as long as they can land a client). That’s the first problem.

The second problem has a lot to do with the first: there’s a lot of money in search marketing. Money + no standardization = opportunity for scammers to exploit.

It’s fashionable for the web design and development industries to dislike SEO, after all it’s not nearly as clean as those disciplines. For one thing, it doesn’t have any firm deliverables - you normally don’t hand over a website when you’re offering SEO services (well, some full-service companies do).

Findability is a much better term than SEO. However it’s still only another label designed to replace a worse one. It doesn’t provide more clarity than SEO for the complex and sophisticated approach they both attempt to define. And it doesn’t acknowledge that at the heart of findability, internet marketing beats.

Furthermore, substitute everything Walter writes about findability with the term of your choice - SEO, SEM, internet marketing, web strategy - and I’ll give you examples of professionals offering that sophisticated level of service but using the latter monikers to describe it.

Strategy Encompasses Search

My preference is to label our expertise internet marketing. We are web strategists who perform many different techniques to get your company found online. But we also get your product sold, and we drive your site subscriber numbers, and we build your site community. We go way beyond just sending traffic. And we go way beyond just doing SEO.

Search is a critical component of online marketing, but it’s only a single component. Within a complete marketing strategy, there are many different essential pieces. Yes, search marketing represents the lion-share of potential in many cases, but there are occassions when it must take a back seat to other initiatives that may have a higher return, or that may be a better fit with business goals.

The fallacy has been to label everything to do with internet marketing as search engine optimization. Yet there are some fantastic internet marketers, who may be primarily focused on search, but who offer internet marketing expertise that’s far beyond the narrow (and self-inflicted) identity of a SEO.

The concept of Findability is attractive, and I applaud the attempt at raising internet marketing to a higher level and incorporating it into other aspects of web strategy. In fact, maybe the real concept here isn’t findability or internet marketing but web strategy. In the context of an overarching strategy, design, development, and marketing (findability) are all essential components.

Walter has a luscious graphic illustrating where he envisions findability in the mix. But I would switch out “Findability” in the center of that image, with “Web Strategy.” Being findable shouldn’t be at the center of all other disciplines: being strategic should be.

Conclusions? Not So Much

Part of what makes this topic so difficult (and what makes my job so challenging) is that internet marketing influences every aspect of website development, design and promotion. How you build the site in the very beginning has consequences in how it will be promoted later, and how successful it will be in organic SERPs, in social media, in speaking to site visitors, in converting a lead.

I like the idea of findability; I like its moderate sensibility. But we must actively promote our clients. We must push their sites into the fray. As long as we’re promoting relevance, what we do is scalable and has lasting value. Promoting irrelevance doesn’t have lasting value, but it’s what most people associate SEO with.

Findability leaves us in the dark if people aren’t searching for us. Findability implies dependence upon searching. It’s a passive term. What if people aren’t searching? That’s what internet marketing can do - reach those who aren’t actively searching for you. To do this, however, you have to go way beyond SEO, and into the realm of marketing on the web.

Marketing on the web… sorry, there’s another one.

The Fundamentals of Building Links

There is a golden rule to link building: links reflect value on the web. Remember that rule, because we’ll come to it later.

Right now, let’s expand that rule with two important definitions:

1. Linking is a communication and citation signal inherent to the web. Links reflect contribution, value, relevance and influence. If you want a scalable solution for building high-quality links, then provide solid value and contributions to your market, industry and community. If you do, the links will come - with hard work.

2. There are many different ways to build links. There’s no “right way” and no “best practices,” there’s only creativity, intelligence, and labor.

Links are now a major commodity. It wasn’t always this way. In the pre-Google era, links were about sharing resources and getting traffic.

Today, links are about traffic, sure, and they’re about sharing - but they’re also about search engines (especially Google).

Links have two primary audiences: visitors and search engines. You want the traffic and credibility association good links can provide for your visitors, and you want the rankings boost good links can provide for the search engines. Learn to distinguish between these seemingly disparate audiences, but don’t forget this guideline: develop your linking (and marketing) strategy with people in mind, not search engines. Just don’t be blind to the search optimization factors involved.

Link Building Today

There are nearly an infinite number of potential link opportunities on the web today. Link sources are literally everywhere you turn. That’s great if you know where to start, but what if you don’t? Then you need to distinguish between low-quality links and high-quality links, or between links that have little value and links that have the potential to be valuable.

The image to the right is the entire Star Wars movie in 1 second screen captures. Each screen grab is analagous to a website. The result (for our purposes) is the image of a nearly infinite amount of sites, and thus potential link sources.

There are endless potential sources of links on the web.

To be faced with so many link opportunities can be daunting, and it begs the questions: where does one start? What links matter, and what links don’t? How does one find a “good” link in an endless sea of potential link sources?

These are all fundamental questions that I’ll do my best to answer.

Components of a Quality Link

There are seven primary components that define a valuable link:

• Relevance: valuable links are relevant to your market, industry or community. Valuable link sources are within your neighborhood on the web and provide you with accurate co-citation.
• Context: valuable links are contextual and come from sources with keyword-focused pages. How do you know if a page is keyword-focused? Well, does it rank? In most competitive markets, pages that rank well - and hold their rankings - are semantically well-optimized and have plenty of descriptive text on the page. You want your link surrounded by that keyword-themed content.
• Difficulty: in general, valuable links are difficult to obtain. There is an associated cost: whether it’s in the investment of the link itself (note that I’m not talking about paid links), in the content that secures the link, in the site development and design, or in the time requirement getting in front of the webmaster. Valuable links are not inexpensive to secure, and they’re not easy to secure. The most valuable links come from sources where your competitors are unlikely to get the same link.
• Humanity: valuable links require a human element to obtain. We all like direct link sources, but quite often the most high-value backlinks come from sources that have a human being in control of the website. You are picking up the phone and calling a webmaster, or emailing a contact person, or networking with someone in charge of an influential site or blog at a conference. There is almost always a human being in charge of creating links on the pages you want to target.
• Credibility: a quality link comes from a credible source. Credible link sources elevate the perceived credibility of the site they’re linking to because they’re already trusted sources.
• Authority: working alongside the credibility quotient is authority. High quality links come from authoritative sources, either in your niche or in the wide environment of the web.
• Investment: valuable links require an investment of some sort. This factor goes hand-in-hand with the Difficulty factor. There’s an associated cost involved, whether in the development of a targeted piece of content or survey, in the purchase of the link, in the design and launch of the site, or simply in the time required to influence the influencers.

The Importance of Link Neighborhoods

As was stated earlier, there are many different ways to approach link building. By far the most popular and widespread is the tactic of getting links in sheer quantity. The idea is to bludgeon the search engines with so many backlinks that you simply overpower competing sites. After all, a site with 30,000 links is usually going to out-rank a site with 3,000, right?

Well, not always. There is another way, and it’s called relevance.

Remember the importance of finding link sources that are within your ideal link neighborhood? I mentioned that above as the first criteria in our 7 components of defining quality links.

Building links en masse is fine if you can do it, but it’s usually a ham-fisted approach. The more subtle method (that’s also much harder to accomplish) is to target high-value link sources within your market. Monitor what neighborhood Google thinks your site belongs in, and monitor what neighborhood your ideal link sources fall in. Pay attention to co-citation factors to ensure your list of potential backlink sources are citing high-quality resources within your target market. If they’re not (and this is another area where paid links hurt you), your rankings will suffer (or at least be sub-optimal).

I’ve seen many sites outrank competitors with less incoming links. They do it (usually unintentionally) by garnering higher quality, more on-topic links from relevant neighborhoods of sites. And there’s another advantage as well, in that topically-relevant links will garner targeted traffic that’s more likely to convert.

Where To Begin

Start building links by focusing on your market. Remember the importance of your link neighborhood, and build links strategically with that in mind. Nearly every imaginable topic is being discussed on the web; there are centers of influence, there are bloggers, there are directories and mailing lists and forums and social sites. Find where people are talking about your market, and enter the discussion through channels such as:

• Hubs: use Aaron Wall’s fantastic Hub Finder tool to locate topically-relevant pages through co-citation. It’s free and it rocks.
• Forums: perform searches like this one at Google to find forums in your niche.
• Authority Sites: perform searches like this one to find authority link sources. Use different words for targets along with your key phrase, and substitute the site: portion with other TLDs:

  "keywords" [library] [resources] [sites] [links] site:[.mil] [.us] [.gov] [.edu]

• Social Media: in addition to performing search variations of the above examples, you can use well-researched lists like this one on 48 social news sites and this one with 40 niche social media sites. You should also consider joining SEOmoz.org where a premium membership gives you access to an excellent directory of over 100 social media sites by topic.
• Influencers: where do the influential bloggers hang out? Find out using tools like Technorati, Techmeme and Google Blog Search. Delicious can also be useful, as can Digg and a number of other tools.
• Email Lists: email discussion lists represent a wealth of largely untapped link building potential. They’re not utilized as much as they could be for internet marketing, partly because they take a lot of time committment and specific knowledge to post to (and thereby benefit from correctly). They also normally don’t pass any anchor text in the link - which is great if you’ve got a domain with some semantic value - but otherwise not ideal. Similar to forums and communities, if you can’t offer something of real value you won’t last on an email list. There are lots of good potential sources, just take care to approach these with the community in mind first and your link drop second. Sources like this one, and this one, and this one should sufficiently whet your appetite.
• Blogs: even with rampant nofollow in effect, there are plenty of benefits from posting comments on blogs. Ignore for a moment the question if anchor text is passed from a nofollowed link. By posting on high-traffic and influential blogs, you are getting in front of many people and contributing to the discussion. If you provide something of value, visitors (and the blog owner) will most definitely visit your site to check you out. Do it repeatedly and you’ll begin to create a reputation for yourself which could lead to business opportunities. And of course there are lots of dofollow blogs online, just do a simple search to find them.
• Directories: directories should be considered as a staple for any business online - but not just any directory. Google has increased their disdain of most directories, since most directories are designed only to make the owner the most money rather than create the most relevant lists of links. Good directories to use include Yahoo!, Business.com, Best of the Web, DMOZ, and Starting Point. There are myriad niche directories as well, do creative searching to find them and also use lists such as the one found on SEOmoz (you’ll have to be a premier member there to see it).
• Organizations: every small business should belong to the Better Business Bureau. You get a link, and it’s valuable. Third-party organizations exist in nearly every industry and market, use these to advantage.
• News Sites: news is one of the pillars of online content, and has several advantages for publishers, including wide adoption of syndication. Online press releases are a good idea, use them. Just use them right (and that’s another post). In the meantime, no one knows it better than Lee Odden.
• Human-Powered Search: human-powered search engines are sites like Mahalo, Bessed, and ChaCha where human beings (real human beings!) are assimilating tightly focused, topical pages. If the human-powered search site is valuable and the link category is competitive, it’s going to take high-quality or even exceptional content to get listed.

Build Links Strategically

When you starting building links, do it in a systematic way. The following pyramid shows one method of thinking about link building as steps from easiest and lowest cost, to most difficult and highest cost.

• The triangle is segmented into 6 steps. At the base and 1st step are link sources such as quality directories, classified advertising, and third-party organizations. These require some sort of investment, but it’s normally not substantial.
• Working up the triangle, the links get more valuable (only as a general rule) and more expensive. The 2nd step contains link sources such as email lists, forums, blog comments, and social media profile pages.
• The 3rd step is reserved for places like article sites, niche directories, human-powered search engines and guest blog postings.
• The 4th step contains techniques like basic social media marketing (creating Myspace pages, Facebook groups and profiles, etc) and online public relations.
• When we reach the 5th step, we’re getting into advanced link acquisition territory: reaching key influencers (Rand Fishkin’s linkerati) through social media.
• The pinnacle and 6th step of the triangle is reserved for the Hilltop: authority sites at the center of Google’s Trustrank (which is starting to appear out-dated and vulnerable, but is still essential to their algorithm). For 90% of sites in a market, these are unobtainable links and come from sources like the US Military, government offices, libraries, universities, non-profits, high-traffic Wikipedia pages, old-school individual sites and so on. These sites normally require very topical, high-quality, and mostly non-commercial content (not to mention a concerted effort) to acquire links from. But they’re imminently worth all the trouble.

By approaching the art of building backlinks as a series of distinct channels, and by identifying the best links among a sea of potential opportunities, you can strategically find the most high-value links, spend your resources with those targets in mind, and build them systematically. As the pyramid indicates, the bulk of links come from sources that are of relatively less value but are easier to obtain. These build the foundation of a site’s link profile. The most valuable backlinks come from fewer sources that are more restrictive in their linking policies, and form the peak of a link profile.

Conclusion

Now forget everything you just read and remember the golden rule of linking:

With that rule in mind, what’s the most efficient method of building powerful backlinks?

The answer is simple, but the way is hard: you must build exceptional resources and provide information that’s unique and valuable. Only then will you succeed long-term in link building, and therefore, internet marketing.

Grant Crowell of Grantastic Designs enaged Jared Spool on the topic in late November of 2007, and shared it with the LED Digest this week. The topic at hand was the interchange between search and usability. Grant highlights the major content of the talk in his post to the LED Digest, which is well worth a read.

After listening to the podcast (directly below these comments), here are my thoughts:

• Spool doesn’t feel there’s any issue here, in terms of search versus usability. I tend to agree, and like his analogy of baseball: what’s better, a second baseman or a pitcher? The question is meaningless.
• That said, I think usability engineers tend to discount internet marketing (they discount SEO in particular), and Spool displays this habit. (To be fair, SEOs tend to discount usability too, so it works both ways.) I don’t think there’s an issue between either SEO or usability - I agree that’s meaningless. But there is an issue here - an important one. Spool hits it dead on later in the interview.
• The issue is that reaching out with internet marketing (I’ll just call it SEO) really only works if you’ve got a good, usable site on the other end. Spool touched on this when he spoke to “designing for the whole experience” from how a site appears in the SERPs, to how it appears in a user’s browser, to making it easy for visitors to share your site’s content.
• There’s another important issue here as well. How do people use search engines? Their (our) behaviour is complex and multiform, but what can be counted on are things like opening links in new windows but keeping them in the background, opening links then quickly going back to the SERP, opening a new page and bookmarking it for later, quickly glancing at results for anticipated words in bold, etc. There’s a school of thought for these types of behaviors (with terms like berry picking and pogo sticking and scanning and foraging), and they’re crucial to usability. They’re also crucial to SEO. Being familiar with different types of search behaviours can be a powerful aid in an online strategy.

Spool said it very well: we need to approach the web as an entire experience. It’s reaching out and promoting your site so people know about it, it’s optimizing it to be found, it’s running ads on search engines for placement. It’s designing good, highly usable sites, doing testing and research, adding functionality. It’s all important and it all works together.

It’s going to get harder to compete online by doing “just enough.” Thinking of a web site as being part of a topical web experience changes the perspective a ton, and reveals usability and SEO as specific tools within the same tool box. A hammer isn’t better than a screwdriver, is it? They’re tools that do the same thing: build something. It’s the same with usability and SEO.

Check out the interview:

The article above does a good job of outlining the issues. To summarize, here are the major problems with Adwords that every advertiser needs to get a handle on:

Automatic Matching

What it does: uses Google’s proprietary technology to match your keywords to related terms.
Why worry: broad matching has already proven to be problematic for many advertisers. There are usually good reasons to use broad-matched keywords - we often do so for our clients - but always with caution. The ideal set-up is to incorporate embedded match into separate ad groups to separate broad, phrase, and exact matched keywords. Then you can get a pure signal about CPC, CTR, and conversion data by match type.
More reading: see Automatic Matching: Don’t Fall for This! by Dan Thies, and this thread on SEM 2.0 about embedded matching.

Content Network

What it does: displays your ads on Google’s partner sites as contextual ad placements.
Why worry: your ads will automatically show on the content network, unless you explicitly opt-out. Best practices are to run your content and search network ads as separate campaigns. Combining them is problematic because it tends to skew keyword data.
More reading: check out the information Google provides on site targeting before you run a content network campaign. In addition to being useful for improving ad performance on publisher sites, site targeting (which Google also calls placement targeting) can be a dynamite competitive research tool. In this post Aaron Wall outlines some of the pros and cons of using Google’s site targeting feature.

Quality Score & Ad Rank

What it does: Google’s Quality Score (QS) dictates what your minimum bid will be, and with Ad Rank, where your ad is displayed in the paid search results.
Why worry: the way Google ranks ad quality and dictates minimum bids has to be opaque. That’s not surprising, really. What can be surprising is how unwary advertisers can get burned here. While Google targets so-called “bad actors” by hiking up minimum bids when keywords and landing pages don’t match up, sites without knowledge of how QS factors into their costs can become collateral damage.
More reading: the best place to start is on Google’s fantastic Adwords Help Center, for example this section entitled What is Quality Score and how is it calculated? and this topic list on Ad Quality and Performance factors.

So what’s the consensus, is Google evil? No. Google is simply a big business looking out for itself. Remember: Google fails as a search engine when the following happens:

• They lose relevance
• Searchers lose faith in the results
• Advertisers get poor results

There’s at least the potential for Google to become evil with Adwords. Why? Because it’s so complicated. There are a lot of dials to turn. There are a lot of little tricks to learn. Many small advertisers are at the mercy of Adwords when they launch campaigns without being educated about the network. Because of that, there’s the potential for Google to squeeze ever more money out of them - at least until the advertiser stops their campaigns because they simply can’t afford them.

As PPC consultants, obviously it’s our job to educate our clients and get them the best Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) we can. But it’s also our job to work with Google, Yahoo, MSN, or whoever the next useful paid search provider will be. Whenever I’ve met with representatives from the major search engines, I’ve always been impressed by how open and friendly they are. They’re a lot like me! It’s just that they’re on the other side of the value equation - as the provider of the network or service. As the provider of consultation and education (and ROI) for our clients, it’s in our best interest to work alongside these networks and align with their needs.

So, does that all sound like I’m bootlicking Google? Maybe it does. But it comes down to this: we’re in the business of building revenues and online visibility for our clients. That means we’re also in the business of working with the search engines.

Hold the Phone!
Sorry about the mess around here. This site is under construction, so you’ll find a lot of unfinished areas. We’re working hard to get it finished, but we’re real busy making our clients lots of money!

AudetteMedia was born and bred online. We are the product of over a decade of internet marketing and web strategy experience. We’re a small, focused, boutique shop, and we eat and breathe internet marketing.

What’s the single most important thing you look for in a Internet marketing company? It may be a multitude of things, or it may be just a handful. But at the center of it all are two essentials: results and relationships. You want results, and you want them to come from a company with people you can relate to.

AudetteMedia’s team is dedicated to the customer relationship. We listen to you and take time to develop a complete web strategy. Succeeding online is not quick and easy; it takes time and dedication. We bring the knowledge and experience to help you succeed online. And we put extra effort into the customer relationship, into understanding and communicating with you or your team.

Best of all: we deliver results.