Search Marketing

September 2011 Issue --> Search Marketing Article

Labeling Your Information Using SEO Techniques

By: Nancy E. Wigal

I've previously talked about infrastructure architecture (IA) and SEO at a very high level. I'm publishing more information about each component of IA. My other article talked about the first component, the organization system and how you can use SEO to organize your content on your web pages. Now I'm going to talk about the second part of IA - labeling systems.

In IA, labeling means representing large amounts of information on your web site. Typically on a web site. Labels are those navigation links like "Contact Us," "Services," and "Order."

Labels are a great way to easily and clearly show the web visitor your organization and navigation (to be discussed in the next article) systems.

A large website may show labels that group information on interior pages. For example, a web page may have high level labeling like this: Home Computing, Business Computing, Cloud Storage, etc. Under each major label, there will be multiple pages featuring products. The Home Computing label may have Desk Top Computers, Laptop Computers and Printers underneath it.

When designing and implementing your site's labeling system consider the end user's language to speak clearly to her. The labels should easily communicate to her what she can expect to find on the interior pages.

Here are a few labels that probably don't easily tell us what we can find on each page:

"Main" - main what? Main topic? Main product?

"Corporate" - Who is this, and what does it mean to the prospect? Corporate training? Corporate communications?

"Miscellaneous" - one of the most terrible labels of all. If you haven't done your content organizing right, you may fall into this trap of creating a bucket of "miscellaneous" information that begs further organizing and refinement.

These are very generic labels that don't give us a clue as to what we'll see. More to the point, they are truly uninspiring to click on.

There are several different labels we can use on our pages. They are:

Contextual links - these are hyperlinks to blocks of information on a different page, or in another location on the same page. We are all very familiar with these. SEO specialists know that these links can and should contain keyword phrases to communicate clearly to the reader and to increase the page's chances of being ranked and indexed higher in search results.

Headings - these just describe content on a page. Again, for SEO purposes, you can use the H1 tag which is considered by the search engine spiders and bots, and incorporate your main keyword phrase in it.

Navigation systems - these are labels that show us the different navigation options on a web site.

Index terms - these include keywords and tags that good SEO processes and techniques leverage for higher search results.

With labels, you can incorporate your SEO strategy of using keyword phrases to boost individual page search results. For a high level label on a landing or home page for example, you could use a high level, generic keyword term for that label. For the interior or lower tier pages underneath, label them with the keyword phrase you're using to optimize the page and meta data.

Be sure your label is effective. It needs to clearly communicate the content on the page. Be sure you use your labeling system consistently through out the entire site. You'll confuse your web visitor if you use more than one label for the same content.

While I'll talk about this in a later article, one source of naming labels is your controlled vocabularies and thesauri sources in your infrastructure architecture system.

Labels can also come the web page content itself, subject matter experts and your target market. Be sure to keep your labels simple and clear. Your web analytics data can also yield good labeling terms for web pages.

Nancy E. Wigal

Search Engine Academy Washington DC

http://www.search-engine-academy-washington-dc.com/Small-Business-SEO.html

Get SEO-trained and certified in one of our two, three or five day SEO training courses in the Washington DC area. Custom SEO training and consulting is also available upon request. Call 202.725.1422 for more information.

Bookmark this page now...

Labeling Your Information Using SEO Techniques by Nancy E. Wigal

Stumble It!

Other Search Marketing articles enjoyed by our readers.

Labeling Your Information Using SEO Techniques
by Nancy E. Wigal

How To Do Local Search Marketing At No Cost
by Dennis Clark, Ph.D.

How To Choose Long Tail Keywords
by Richard Petrillo

Click here for all Search Marketing articles