Information architecture? Persuasion architecture?
When I first heard these terms, I thought of the Seinfeld episodes where George Costanza pretends to be an architect, a profession he considers the most venerable. (I know, my mind makes random connections!)
Persuasion and info architecture actually pertain to the optimum structure of a website, one that has the both the information (content - text, video, audio) and the persuasive layout (call-to-action buttons, key elements relating to eye-tracking patterns, etc.) required to turn web visitors into sales leads, AND Search Engine Optimization embedded into every aspect.
Sound obvious? Not so much…
SEO blogging star Jill Whalen names the following as one of 6 Common Website Mistakes that are Costing you Money
“Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture. The deeper that pages are buried within the website, the less importance they are given.”
My own experience indicates that lots of companies are making fatal errors when choosing a designer based on bells and whistles - Flash, pretty colors, modern layout - instead of examining the navigation taxonomy, how optimized for search engines the programming is, coding errors to avoid, and - of course - the innate usability of a site from stem to stern.
So take your SEO strategy deep…. deeper….right down to the bones of your site.
Here’s a spin on the 
“what do you feed a 500-lb. gorilla?” joke…
Q: What do you pay a designer who builds Search Engine Optimized sites?
A: Whatever he wants!!
That’s because a designer/web developer whose coding, site hierarchy and other practices are search engine optimized is just that rare - and just that important to your success getting found online.
Search engine-friendy design is one of the 10 Commandments of SEO, as per this BrowserTech blog edict:
“A search and visitor friendly design is a must for any successful website. Your website should be compelling enough for repeat visits by search engines and potential customers. Make sure you have search engine friendly URLs and avoid those long URLs with query strings.”
Yup, but there’s a whole lot more to SEO-friendly design than URLs - and it’s pretty darn technical stuff. Things like:
- Good code-to-content ratio (no ‘code bloat’)
- Clean HTML
- Hierarchical design
- No hacking
- CSS [Cascading Style Sheets]-controlled elements
- Compliant with World Wide Web Consortium standards
Our designers were trained by the best in SEO
Most of the team of immensely talented web designers at writingSEO was trained at the same Internet publishing company as I was - a place where SEO was ingrained into our everyday practice.
One of our designers, C.K., sums up the balancing act he walks between designing pages that get ranked well in search engines and feature the interactive, audio/visual bells and whistles that people expect today:
Designs can be as fancy as they want, and there is no stipulation that states that a graphically or multimedia-saturated site cannot rank as high as any other text-based CSS-only site. It’s all about content accessibility and SEO-driven content…
There you have it, SEO writing and design: more than just a pretty face… a pretty face that people actually get a chance to see!
Information architecture? Persuasion architecture?
