I love Information Architecture (IA), especially as it relates to SEO and web usability, so I’m always scanning for great articles on those topics.

Here is a great Search Engine Land article on how IA intersects with the world of SEO.

The author, Kim Krause Berg defines Information Architecture as: “offering directions in a manner that depends on who or what is asking for them”. I really like that simple explaination of what IA is. IA isn’t navigation, IA isn’t SEO, IA is how you organize your information, the ‘design’ of your information.

Some of the ways you can incorporate “Information Architecture” thinking to your SEO efforts, according to Kim, are:

• Use SEO-keywords in your navigation labels (e.g. ‘SEO services’ rather than ‘Services’)
• Have Personas, or “Mental Models” of your users – That allows you to design a better IA
• Taxonomies & ontologies – Think through your categorization of products and categories (‘Taxonomy’) and how they relate to each other (‘Ontology’) – I’m visualizing breadcrumb navigation as a way to picture these concepts together. SEO’s work with content, Information architects work with the relationships between the content