DoingMedia

My friend Susan Reetz asked about her site keywording. She had her site analyzed at the “Extreme Makeover: Website Edition” session at the MCA-I ProTrack conference in September and the presenter (Susan Price from MediaRich) noticed that her site pages had no keyword or other meta tagging. My friend’s web guy said “Oh, don’t bother with keywords, Google ignores them.” Uh, yeah, but what about the rest of the meta and content I thought? So I replied back to her with my Pyramid of Information Architecture spiel. (I’ll add a drawing later, but here it is in text form.)

               +  Filename  +

            ++    Keywords    ++

         ++++    <title> tag    ++++

      +++++++    Description    +++++++

  +++++++++    Page Title <h1>    +++++++++

++++++++++++    Body Content    +++++++++++++

Think of the information architecture of a web page like a pyramid (not inverted - I’ve never gotten the whole journalism inverted pyramid thing.). The tip of the pyramid is the file name: a one, maybe two, word name of the actual HTML formatted file. In my example it would be “non-profit.htm” (or whatever your pages are coded in.)

Next is are the keywords. Although search engines don’t use them for ranking anymore, it doesn’t hurt to add keywords to the meta “Keyword” or “Subject” tags, just don’t overdo it. The keywords provide a concise description of the page. In my example the keywords might be: non-profit, communication, video, media. (You can test keywords at Google. They have a keyword tool that lets you enter search terms and then shows you how many results might come back.)

The next level of the pyramid is the <title> tag. Here you describe the page in plainer English . Keep it short and sweet and include your branding. I prefer to put the page title first then the branding so the title appears in the search result clearly. The <title> might be something like “Non-Profit Solutions - Rucinsk & Reetz Communications.” Waaay too many sites have pages titled “Default” or “Untitled”. When I create a page the first thing I do is put in the title. A good site information architecture diagram will have the title defined before coding begins.

Next up is the meta “description”. This should be one clear, simple sentence that describes your page. (The <title> and “description” are what is displayed as the search result.) A description for our example might “Non-profits need effective communication almost more than any other kind of organizations because of their limited resources.”

Then you have the Page Title contained in the <h1>. That is the top level Header tag and that’s what it’s for, the page title. It should match what’s in the <title> tag, sans the branding. So we would have “Non-Profit Solutions”.

Last is the content of the page itself. It should use the same language and tone as the <title> and “description” and should include the keywords within the content. Sprinkle the keywords judiciously in the content to continually reinforce what the page is about.