Every time I write a requirements document for SEO, I make sure to address Usability and Information Architecture. I like to think that Google will reward sites that do have good Information Architecture because it is mostly always search engine friendly designs that support crawlability and indexing. This is usually the reason I spend a lot of time with the User Experience team or UX designers, because working closely with them will only help influence a search engine friendly design built into the product requirements. I’m not going to sit here and say that I win every time, but, I’ll take a win where I can get it. Aside from all the awesome acronyms, I thought I would share some of the things that I have seen influence IA, UX, and SEO.
Sub-Pages and Navigation
Deep Content websites have a ton of content that requires you to split pages up and helps from both a standpoint of clean Information Architecture of main page to sub-page. Similar to category and sub-category indexes, entertainment content like Movies, TV, Celebrities and Music all have deep content types and indexes, putting it all on one page would be one incredibly long, unusable page with a horrible user experience. Oh, and that page would probably take 20 seconds to load even on today’s speedy internet connections. I think it’s fairly obvious that pages and sub-page types exist, so, taking a few minutes to think it through is probably a good idea.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are navigational elements that are designed to help the user experience of a website by leaving a trail of where are user is browsing on the site. From an SEO standpoint, breadcrumbs are extremely useful because of all the internal links that are created as you get deeper into the content. For sites with a lot of deep content or a large index of pages, this can be especially helpful because the number of internal links grows exponentially.
Example of a Breadcrumb:
So, let’s say I was designing a breadcrumb for Myspace and I was on the Kim Kardashian topic page. It would look something like this:
Home > Celebrities > Kim Kardashian
And, by the way, the term “Breadcrumb” is probably one of the coolest web terms used…how could you not use them on your site?!
In-Page Navigation
In-Page Navigational links can be referenced in a few different ways, from jump-links to on-page anchors, etc. It’s actually one of the oldest forms of navigation from the web 1.0 days when websites didn’t have fancy menu’s, navigation elements, etc. Today, you’ll still see many sites use in-page navigation to guide users through FAQs or even through large pages. Wikipedia and IMDB are great examples of this as they have fairly long pages and help users move through page content fairly easily.
Now, from an SEO standpoint, this is awesome for internal linking because, URL fragments (#) (and, everything the follows) that are used in on-page anchors are ignored by search engines and therefore creates links internal to that page. While It is debatable from an SEO standpoint, you can leverage URL fragments for SEO benefits in AJAX as well.
Related Links
Related links are a gold-mine and one of my favorite types of ways to leverage User Experience for SEO purposes. From a page to page browsing standpoint, they are great at increase page views while users stay engaged, clicking through your website content. There are all types of implementations from modules in sidebar’s, sub-page sections, and link lists to navigate users through a website. Many of these examples range from “Songs similar to…”, “You might also like…”, or “Top Lists.” Here are some examples from Kanye West’s HAM song page on Myspace:
User Experience and SEO
I tried to show some of the key examples of how user experience and SEO teams can work together. But, there are so many more examples out there and every website and product have different use cases. The key is to work together to create richer and smarter user experiences on the web. And, you can pretty much guarantee that by creating that solid UI, with a well thought out content architecture, you’re site will be search engine friendly. This helps overall SEO strategies through strong internal linking that increases crawl paths and rich anchor text links on your website. An overall win-win for UX and SEO in my opinion.
I make it a point to talk to user experience professionals daily to understand how they think and talk through various scenarios. There are countless times where they have helped me think outside the box on projects and through a simple brainstorm, come up with better SEO solutions for a page, product, or website.
Great work Tony!
Great post Tony! Internal linking is often times undervalued and completely overlooked by many SEOs. This is one of the quickest ways to pass juice from page to page on your website and increase rankings with less effort than external link building. I love it! Thanks for sharing.
I'm soooo glad to see someone posting about the proper use of breadcrumbs. Breacrumbs lose part of their usability value when sites only include links to the previous navigation. As in your example, if they only put:
Home > Celebrities
It's important to include the current page, not linked as you displayed.
Nice writeup, Tony!
This is definitely helpful, it's amazing to see how intricate SEO tactics and UX go hand in hand. Thanks for sharing!
It's too bad if SEO's don't apply those basics. They are the quickest way to rank. Then, all the Ofpage work will give all is power.
This is a great post, Site structure is more important than your content if you have thousands of pages in your site.
While it's great to get a search engine to notice your site and rank it well, it's just as important that your visitors are able to easily navigate the site. If they can easily find what they are looking for it creates a good user experience and they will likely return to the site again and again. Great tips.
Thanks Tony, Internal links are things I was forgetting about, but have been reminded of lately. Now that I have read your post I know how important they can be for SEO strategies.
I've seen first hand the impact of internal link structure improvement at Ranker – thanks in part to some great advice from you, Tony. Just wish I had focused on it even sooner!