I have been reading a great classic book on information architecture – “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” – by Morville and Rosenfeld. The book is filled with wonderful concepts and ideas about how to ‘architect’ information for a web site based upon various criteria such as:

• Organization schemes – organizing by topic, task, audience
• Organization structures – hierarchial, database driven, hypertext, social classification
• Labeling systems – labeling of links, headers, content areas, contextual links
• Controlled vocabularies/Thesauri

It occurred to me that this is exactly how we do search engine optimization work here at Out of Bounds. I talk alot about architecting the web site according to consumer search behavior, carefully labeling links with descriptive names, organizing content tightly into related content areas, navigation areas.

They also have a wonderful chapter on Navigation systems that talks about ‘supplemental’ navigation systems such as site maps, indexes and guides. We can build site maps not only to help search engines understand the site information but also provide another navigation aid to our users. Another SEO idea would be to build various ‘shopping guides’ or tools to help browsers or other shoppers in the early buy phases to find what they are looking for.

The book talks alot about ‘findability’ of information. I can see now how proper information architecture is really the key to both solid web site design and seo design!