Information Architecture

The Information Architecture definition of IA is:

• The structural design of shared information environments.
• The art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.
• An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

This definition shows that information architecture goes beyond websites, and it hints at its complexity. It also reveals how flexible and theoretical information architecture is. From an ecommerce standpoint, let’s oversimplify the definition of information architecture to this single sentence:

The classification and organization of content and online inventory.

You should be familiar with two other important information architecture concepts: taxonomy and ontology. While these names might be intimidating, the concepts are easy to understand. Taxonomy is the classification of topics into a hierarchical structure. For ecommerce, this translates into assigning items to one or more categories. Ecommerce taxonomies are usually vertical, “tree-like” structures. A website’s taxonomy is often referred to as its hierarchy. To visualize a taxonomy, think of breadcrumbs. Notice how the breadcrumbs above mimic the website taxonomy. In our examples, one branch of the taxonomy “tree” leads to Duvet & Comforter Covers, and the other to Aloe Vera Gels. The structures depicted in these two screencaps are ordered using a parent-child relationship, from broader to narrower topics, and they are called taxonomies. One way to create ecommerce taxonomies is to use a controlled vocabulary, which is a restricted list of terms, names, labels, and categories. Usually, it is the information architects who develop these vocabularies. In terms of SEO, you should use semantic markup to help search engines understand taxonomies. One such markup can be applied to your site breadcrumbs. Microdata or RDFa</a > markup is used by search engines to generate breadcrumb-rich snippets similar to this one: Search engines can sometimes display the website taxonomy directly in the search engine results pages (aka SERPs). We will discuss breadcrumbs in detail later in this book, but briefly, this is how the source code for the previous rich snippet example looks like: The second information architecture concept you need to be aware of is ontology. It means the relationships between taxonomies. If an ecommerce hierarchy can be visualized as an inverted tree, with the home page at the top, then an ontology is the forest showing relationships between trees. An ontology might encompass various taxonomies, with each taxonomy organizing topics into a particular hierarchy. Simply put, an ontology is a more complex type of taxonomy, containing richer information about the content and the items on a website. We are just at the beginning of building ontology-driven sites, and one standard ontology vocabulary for ecommerce is GoodRelations</a >. The Semantic Web aims at helping artificial intelligence agents such as search engine bots crawl through and categorize information more efficiently. It is also designed for assisting identifying relationships between items and categories (e.g., relationships between manufacturers, dealers, and prices). Figure 4 – Related Categories or Related Products can be considered a form of ontology. If you are not an information architect or a business analyst, you probably will not be involved in identifying related categories and products, but it is important to know these terms in your discussions with information architects. Sometimes, related categories and products are automatically identified by the ecommerce platform, or by specialized software.

Why is information architecture important for search engines?

A correctly designed information architecture will result in tiered website architecture. A good architecture has an internal linking structure that will allow child pages (pages that can link upwards in the hierarchy, such as product detail pages or blog posts) to support the more important parent pages (upper-level pages that link down in the vertical hierarchy, such as category and subcategory pages). Figure 5 – Pages that link to each other at the same level of the hierarchy are called siblings. They share the same parent. With correct internal linking a blog article, for example, “Top 5 New Features of Canon Rebel T5i DSLR” will support the product detail page Canon Rebel T5i DSLR. Canon Rebel T5i DSLR will support the category Digital Cameras, which will further support the top-level category Electronics. Figure 6 – This pyramid-like structure is a very common architecture for ecommerce. One of the questions that often comes up when deciding on the hierarchy is “What is the best number of levels to reach a product detail page?” The famous three-click rule, which suggests that every page on a website should take no more than three clicks to access</a >, is OK to use as a guide, but do not get stuck on it. If you need a fourth level in the hierarchy, that is perfectly fine</a >. Information architects, business analysts or merchandising teams can help identify relationships between categories, subcategories, and products. Based on these findings, you will decide on rules for an internal linking strategy. Such rules can include:

• Only highly related categories will interlink.
• Categories will link only to their parents.
• Subcategories will link to related subcategories or categories.
• Product pages will only link to related products in the same category, and parent categories.

A proper website architecture will help your website rank for the so-called head terms. For ecommerce websites, these are usually the category pages, at all levels of the hierarchy. However, internal linking is not enough for a subcategory page to reach the top of the search engine results pages for category-related search queries. Because head terms are usually competitive, a page targeting such terms should also include:

• Relevant and useful content. This means that your listing pages should display more than just a list of items. For product detail pages you need to present more than just product pictures and pricing.
• Backlinks from related trusted external websites.

Additionally, proper information architecture means good usability. Great usability and content create an excellent user experience, which then leads to an increased dwell time (which is good for SEO). Dwell time is the amount of time that a searcher spends on a page before returning to the SERPs. The longer this time is, the better. Pogo-sticking</a > means going back and forth between a SERP and the web pages listed in the results. For example, you search for something, click on the first result, you are not happy, you go back to the SERP. Then you click on the second result, you are still not happy, and you go back to the SERP again, and so forth, until you find what you are looking for, or until you refine your search query. A SERP bounce happens when a search engine user clicks on your page in the SERPs and then goes back to the results without interacting with any page elements. Note that a high SERP bounce is not inherently bad for SEO, but a low dwell time might be. An increased dwell time sends quality signals because it hints to search engines that your page is relevant for a given search query. Navigation, such as primary, secondary, breadcrumbs or contextual, is also one of the critical components of website architecture. Navigation is jointly crafted by various members of the business, led by the information architect. Given that the primary navigation will be present on almost every page of the website, it influences how authority and link signals (i.e., PageRank and anchor text >) are passed to other pages. Fortunately, there are ways to give users what they want (findability, discoverability, and usability), and at the same time, guide search engine bots towards what you want them to discover, crawl and index.