Existen dos formas para ser encontrado en la web: Publicidad y técnicas de encontrabilidad. La publicidad es variable y depende de la confianza que se tenga en el sitio. Sin embargo, la técnica, esta ligado a la praxis.

El paso cero de una búsqueda exitosa es centrarse en cómo buscan "mi sitio" para que verdaderamente lo encuentren.  Hoy el gran buscador es google, aún no tiene competencia real, por lo que hay que ponerse en la lógica de su búsqueda.

Generalmente, el usuario no lee más allá de las 2 primeras páginas de los resultados que arroja la búsqueda de google. Por lo tanto, es clave el tema de posicionamiento en la web para subir en el ranking google.

Actualmente, existen otros buscadores que están pensados más allá de la palabra o frase buscada propiamente tal, teniendo como valor agregado el contexto. Buscadores como  exalead y kartoo son una alternativa y una apuesta a esta nueva forma de buscar-encontrar

¿Cuáles son las estrategias para ser divisado por google.? Éstas pasan por una serie de factores la redacción web y un trabajo en el HTML del sitio.

No metaforizar contenido e ingresar palabras que ayuden a ser encontradas, posibles sinónimos o terminos de uso común, por ejemplo, nadie hace un trámite en el Fondo Nacional de Salud, simplemente van a fonasa.

No al uso de flash que impiden la encontrabilidad. Puede ser un elemento de diseño bello, pero para ser encontrado no sirve. Google no lee el código.

URL amistosas, es decir, que la dirección sea de lo que ES el sitio, sin signos, ni asteriscos. Código estandar en las portadas

Correcto uso del lenguaje HTML que permita indexar los contenidos disponibles en el sitio web

Utilizar meta tags acordes con el contenido para que el sitio sea encontrado. Por ejemplo el título de página (title), palabras claves (keywords)

La experiencia de usuario debe ser satisfactoria si en nuestro sitio se encuentra lo buscado. Si ponemos fácil lo difícil, será mucho más atractivo para cautivar al usuario, explicando con palabras sencillas. Por ejemplo, el tema de la encontrabilidad de "salir de dicom", es muy bien explicado en esta dirección http://www.sbif.cl/sbifweb/servlet/AtencionPublico?indice=1.2.1.1&idContenido=4701, siendo que no es la página de dicom.

Lo más importante de todo es tener como premisa que cualquier pagina de mi sitio es la portada y por lo tanto cada una de ellas debe ser bien definida y con palabras claves .   Y en segundo lugar es que la forma de validarse y subir puntos en la web es la alianza de otros  sitios, ser citados por los demás sitios lo que determina un voto de confianza.

Sobre el tema de encontrabilidad, sugiero este video donde aparece un maestro del tema: Peter Morville

Más información sobre el tema de encontrabilidad en el blog de Juan Carlos Camus

• Findability
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Convertability
• Measurability

Making your site Findable

There's no point in the effort to design a beautiful, engaging web site if no one knows about it or can find it. You must create awareness and place links (both online & offline) into your site and its content to have people start coming to your site.

Suggestions:

Making your site Accessible

If people can't access your site, your site has a strong chance of failing. This is true especially for individuals with disabilities. Disabilities impacted by accessibility issues number far more than just blindness; anyone with any type of dexterity issue may find your site difficult to use. Also, make sure your hosting service has good uptime percentage (99% or above). Anything less than that may mean people and search engine spiders cannot access your site.

Making your site Usable

It is one of the most painful things to watch — a complete stranger unable to go from point A to point B on your site. Yet, usability testing is probably the most valuable thing you can do to ensure success. Usability tests don't have to be performed by external experts. If money or budget are an issue, perform basic tests on just 5-6 people, which will cover 70-80% off any issues.

Testing involves scheduling individuals to come to a controlled, quite environment to perform predetermined tasks on a website. It's a good practice to compensate the testers in some meaningful way. If you have little money or time, try what I call the poor man's usability test. Simply grab someone heading from the restroom for a simple 3-5 mins test. Remember, usability tests are not beauty or popularity contests, they're established to obtain information on what users actual do when on a site. For more information on usability and testing, you must read Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think."

Making your site Convertible

If the purpose of your site is to sell something, get people to contact you, or to do something, then the only thing you care about is conversions. A conversion is when anyone completes a task. Typically, these tasks contribute to your bottom line in some way, either directly or indirectly. Examples of conversions would include making a purchase online, downloading a PDF, or simply contacting you for more information.

When you design the site, you must ensure that the desired steps to conversion are explicit and without distraction. Purchasing buttons, download & contact links must be blatant, or else people will simply move on without converting. If you have a purchase button, along with another offer of interest, the are competing with the users attention, and are likely to see up to 50% less conversions.

Making your site Measurable

How successful is your site? How do you base your answer? On what statistic? Or maybe the question is do you track anything, or simply go through live assuming. Just remember what is said about assuming.

You must track the activity on your site to know whether you are successful. Hits, page views, even visitors provide only a little value. More important are Visits (Repeat & New), paths, conversion goals (including conversion funnels and where you lose folks in the conversion process). Track and monitor these metrics on a regualr basis; weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.

Are metric limited to your web site? Heck no. If email marketing, specifically HTML emails are part of the Internet Marketing plan, make sure that you track opens, clicks, etc. And tracking of email activity is not limited to the email itself. Links from emails to your website can be tracked to determine conversions from emails also.

AIIM Research Report on Findability

The report confirms the anecdotal evidence that enterprise search is in a retarded state and provides what seems to me to be a clarion call for all professionals involved in KO and related activities to make the case for KO: better organization improves findability.

It won't be enough just to say what we've always said and have it fall, yet again, on deaf ears. We must be ready to jump aboard this bandwagon of opportunity and make our case as directly as possible.

ISKO UK is already considering holding an event in early 2009 where KO practitioners can engage with senior managers from the private sector in an amicable debate to explore exactly why they don't appreciate that information is one of their most valuable resources - and needs to be managed as such.

KOnnect invites your views on this proposal. Do you think it could make a difference? Could you help in any way?

When I began to become enraptured with Web 2.0 I wanted to find ways to use intelligent, emerging instruments from the semantic web to continually improve findability and search optimization of resources I had gathered over many years, even if my own PC broke down and all my back up systems failed, and my own memory became faulty, or . . . I had hoped that blogging would help me remember where I put things that might someday be useful again.

The catalyst for "Folksonomy: optimizing soul searching" was a question regarding how absent categories impose their presence through their very absence. Faced with closed field category/subcategory options offered by Digg for example, under which I had to place my article, etc I struggled between philosophy or society, finance or economics, environment or politics.

I have also found it enlightening to find under which categories my own Creative Commons blogs, articles, posts and images might appear.

As my own sites grow organically, my categories and parent categories constantly need to be reformulated; new tags added and others deleted or merged. The goal is efficiency and elegance in the ungainly word of "findability" or search engine optimization, potent instruments in the semantic web.

At times I am frustrated by the absence of categories that exclude entire populations and conversations. Recently I came across a site hosted by the Washington Post. In their About page they describe how they use the limitless space of the online world to host a blog entitled "On Faith" which invites "intelligent, informed, eclectic, respectful,fruitful, intriguing and constructive conversation-among specialists and generalists about the things that matter most, religion, the most ancient of forces, the most pervasive yet "least understood topic in global life."

I read comments and the post from David Grant, a junior at Virginia Tech who commenting on his visit to the Baha'i gardens in Haifa,Israel-Palestine (which has recently been named as an International Heritage Site) remarking on the broad reach of the Baha'i religion. "Where else on Earth could you find a family from the Bible Belt, a pair of South Africans currently working in Japan, and a crew of Peruvians all heading to say their prayers at the same spot?"

I wanted to search "On Faith" for more strings on the Baha'i but realized that Baha'i World Faith was not offered in their pop-up menu of "List Posts by Topics" which did include: Anglican, Atheist/Agnostic, Buddhist, Catholic, Christian, Earth-based Spirituality, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopal, Evangelical, Greek Orthodox, Hindu, Jewish, Mainline Protestant, Mormon, Muslim, Native American religion, Protestant, Quaker, Sikh, Taoist, Wiccan.

As of February 2008 there were 5,000,000 Baha'is in the world and 159,692 Baha’is in the United States. I couldn't find a figure for either Taoist or Wiccans but one site at least claimed that in 2001 there were c. 34,000 Wiccans in the US.

Baha'is promote tolerance and moderation and are anxiously concerned with the social issues of the time in which they live. Baha'is around the globe contribute to civil society at locally, regionally, nationally levels on issues and programs related to World Religion Day, interfaith relations, religious freedom, Race Unity Day, race unity, elimination of prejudice, advancement of women (CEDAW), human rights, among others. Baha'is have offices at United Nations as NGO are are prominent in international forums as invited participants acknowledged for civil moderate behaviour in the most volatile situations. Recently the U.S. Bahá’í U.N. representative Jeffery Huffines received a Friendship Award for his work “promoting cultural understanding throughout the world and at the UN Headquarters” and for serving as a “positive, guiding force” to all. It is surprising that Baha'is seem to be largely absent from this forum.

The categories offered under "List Posts by Topics" are confusing since some are parent categories for the others. The Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants and Evangelical are all followers of Christ and are all therefore Christians. Which discussions take place solely under the name of Anglican, Mainline Protestants and Episcopal? In terms of the semantic web it would be far more useful to provide a theme-based "List of Topics" that is inclusive of all the groups and religions mentioned. Tags could be used to facilitate searches for a Quaker, Sikh or Baha'i or Catholic perspective, for example. I would recommend that the blog architects revisit and update their taxonomy using principles of folksonomy: what users do with words.

Years of working with research materials leads to a way of thinking with categories, subcategories; key words (tags); abstracts, descriptions, key concepts, timelines, references in .eml or similar formats. The semantic web revs up that process with powerful tools. So my blogs are always a work in progress, process works.

My own personal blogs are experimental and while I am very conscientious about what is here, I can claim no professional authority in any one field.

At this time in my life I feel as if I live outside linear time. Blog stats soar up suddenly for no apparent reason on a blog posted weeks or month ago. So I tidy it up a little. Then the graph drops sharply again with no apparent reason. I don't need to try to control it.

Outside linear time, I could just pick up threads begun months ago on Milton Friedman, the social history of Inuit, media objectivity or what we do in the name of such concepts as "memory work" or "everyday life." Through creative commons I could share all my teaching, learning and research resources without having to shorten them, tidy them up or make them ready for someone else's deadline. Take what you need and leave the rest. I would still work as hard as I could to maintain my own standards particularly in investigating , acknowledging and referencing sources of information, images, etc.

As I am creating, writing, coding, snurling, twittering, blogging, and uploading to wikipedia, social bookmark accounts, my blogs or others' etc I have absolutely no trust in anyone.

I post knowing that anything I have shared can be misinterpreted, misunderstood, misread. It can be rejected, ignored, criticized. It can be copied and pasted without my name attached. I license all my work under the Creative Commons License 3.0 SA-NC-BY but I know it cannot be enforced in most cases.

So why bother?

What I do is not based on my need to trust others in cyberspace. I do not feel as though I am an embodied link in an embodied network in linear time and space.

This is even more than that. If I use the semantic web effectively, a searcher who is not "now" from a geographic location that is not "here" can still find my arrows, my markers, hotwords and icons, index-mouse-clicks that might just help them a little in their search. Maybe I will be that searcher.

It is more important to me to work hard at providing information that is not misinformation, trying hard to be as close to the truth as is possible, to use the most powerful arguments from the most reliable texts available to me at any given time.

I am not an anthropologist nor a journalist; I am definitely not a churnalist. My responsibility to me and therefore to others in this network or not, is to post that which I believe to be useful in a way that allows others to follow a trail of truth claims should they choose.

Thirteen years ago Francis Fukuyama in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995) questioned predictions that the Internet, the computer to computer communication network, unleashed from restrictions imposed by its creator, the Department of Defense, would herald a new organizational network constituted by small firms and individuals that would prove to be superior to large, hierarchical corporations and anarchical market relationships (Fukuyama 1995:195). Fukuyama argued that network efficiency depended on reciprocal moral judgment [1], "a high level of trust and the existence of shared norms and ethical behaviour between network members (Fukuyama 1995:195)." He contrasted the necessity of that network users share social responsibilities and obligations with hackers and other users who were "free spirits hostile to any form of authority . . . vulnerable to certain forms of normlessness and asocial behaviour."

Fukuyama furthered argued that the Internet is a community of shared values using the concept similar to Shumpei Kumon's notion of "consensus/inducement-based exchange." He felt that Internet users in the 1970s and 1980s (mainly government and academic researchers) internalized unquestioned shared values. The Internet could be kept low-cost if users respected certain ethical standards.

In 1994 two lawyers broke the Internet's code of ethics and bombarded news groups with advertisements for their services (Fukuyama 1995:196). The lawyers were not breaking any written laws and were not shamed into retreat. However, the sheer quantity of hate mail they receive, forced their server shut down.

Although the monitization of all things Internet is well underway, there is also exponential growth in cyberworld capital [2] which like cultural capital or academic capital can facilitate access to certain privileges. I am aware of ways in which users of social networking sites strategize to optimize search engine findability, to increase their hits, statistics, and cyberworld capital.

I am not certain if the success in accumulating cyberworld capital or monitizing all things Internet is made more efficient by trust?

Notes

1. Fukuyama compares network as community concept to the Japanese concept of keiretsu and its western reincarnation in American conglomerates like Gulf + West + ITT. keiretsu depends on a high level of trust.

2. Some measure cyberworld capital in terms such as "authority" as with Technorati. Others self-identify as A1bloggers.

Modern content management systems are increasingly modelled on service-orientated architecture (SOA). This is where content is treated as an individual entity,  that can be can be placed anywhere and that may be read by machines as well as humans.

It offers true adaptability and allows an editor to change entire layouts, create new sections and change the architecture of the site very easily. This, inevitably could affect usability and profitability as they change elements on the page.

Seven key principles for evolving websites

The following principles are elements that help define the user experience online. Using Seth and Brice's 6 points as a basis, I have elaborated and expanded it to 7 principles.

Visual design to aid engagement - the use of images that are contextually related have an immediate impact on a user, they will encourage a user to remain and engage with other elements of the site. By placing clear calls to action in the right areas conversions will increase. Scrolling of a page can also be assisted by ensuring that the visual hierarchy of the page elements is observed and applied through the interface design.

Extract the wisdom of crowds – honesty and transparency with the user base will be appreciated and an avoidance of marketing spiel is an absolute must. Any facility to allow user-generated tagging that will enrich your own taxonomies will be advisable as this enables your taxonomies to reflect the user base. A combination of a top down site structure and bottom-up user generated tags is a preferable arrangement. Have an in-depth look at user generated tags here...

The information is the application – in other words the data owned is unique and is much more valuable than the software it is running off. It is even more valuable if the content can be opened up for a diverse and creative use. Be aware that your own perceptions of the usage of your content should not impede the way your users interact and use your content.

Collaboration is key - At all times encourage users to participate, communicate around subjects and allow collaboration with each other to help form communities around content areas. Those people who do participate are often vocal members of their own communities, and often are key workers, intelligent and influential. Give the tools to the users to allow flexible interaction with each other and the site owners. Trust the crowd, and do not abuse that trust by trying to sell, or market to them uninvited.

The interface must be clear and simple - AJAX technology has meant that the interaction that a user has on a site is no longer a page by page journey. This increase in sophistication of the interface has also seen a simplification in the user experience. A careful balance between features and simplicity must be struck with quick server response times.

Content objects are as important as pages - The elements on a page need to be considered as individual entities as well as the overall presentation of your content, how it is laid out and prioritised. These factors impact on the ability of your user to find, scan, and consume content. In effect we are not just publishing on one display surface (a web page) but offering multiple channels to view our content through RSS and AJAX technologies. This means that the content will appear in a variety of areas beyond your immediate control, although the content displayed can be changed

Content exists on multiple platforms that are adaptable– The ideal is to make your service interfaces standard, flexible, lightweight and multi-device friendly. The content you provide has gone beyond the browser

Know your user better than they know themselves

Know the value of user knowledge and research. Ethnographic research is regarded as being the best, so spend time with the user (physically and virtually). Encourage collaboration by;

1. Allowing access to unreleased material ( and increasing your user base)
2. Let them publish exclusives on their blogs/media channels
3. Set up user pools for beta testing

This will help build trust, and that is part of the online experience that can never been understated. Gerry McGovern states;

Remember, your gut instinct behaviour on your website is probably very different to the gut instinct behaviour of your readers. That’s because you know your website inside out. Most of your customers hardly know it at all. To your potential customers it’s a totally new experience.

Good self-service design is about focusing on the essentials. It’s about stripping away everything that is unnecessary. It is about limited choice rather than endless choices. It’s about understanding the essence of what someone needs to do to complete a task.

Web management is about understanding how people interact with content. You won’t learn to become an effective web manager by sitting behind your desk. Get out there and wear out some shoe leather.

Who are the users?

Firstly lets start with the business, in all their different forms, from author to editor to publisher to sales director. We need to be aware of who they are and how they will use the system. There could be several different user roles in a CMS:

• Contributors: a person who offers information to be displayed on the site.
• Authors: a person who writes content for the site.
• Editors: a person who reviews written content and suggests or makes changes. An editor can approve or deny the content to be published.
• Publishers: a person who sets the content to be published (posted) on the website.
• Translators: this is a person who translates a piece of content into one or more different languages.

Then look at our users, they used to be consumers, now they are also contributors, enable channels for them to do this easily, with the minimum of effort. Encourage user profiles and accounts, thereby adding responsibility to their comments, as they become more accountable.

Finally think of the machines reading our content the power of RSS and all the readers and display surfaces that will show the syndicated content. Be wise in your metadata mark up when supplying this type of information and realise the pervasive importance of this area of the digital medium.

Tasks not workflow

A task based approach is a more fluid and agile way of maintaining the system and it is generic, independent of different market cultures and political elements. Rather than detail a workflow that may be specific to the culture that the users work in, try to propose tasks that will be highlighted and grouped and that can be tackled by a multitude of users.

Micro changes and Macro Effects

Its ok to experiment as long as you test and measure the effects of changes and that designs can be rolled back to previous iterations. The tenants of good design, have not changed but there is more flexibility in the new CMS to test small changes, often. There is a need to promote the idea that failure is acceptable as long as lessons are learnt and enhancements made as a direct result from experimentation.

The types of change and learning needed;

• Changes in content – the different types of task need to be realised and ensure that the team is task based not workflow based.
• Visual changes – team must know that moving elements on a page may have an effect on user engagement, page impressions or conversions.
• Structural changes – Team need to realise the importance of information architecture for site structure, authority and the impact on SEO.
• Changes to metadata – Team needs to know how changes to the content of metadata will have an effect on the SEO and also how information is packaged for syndicated content in RSS.

Tools and techniques for designing and testing content

Measuring and testing user behaviour

• A/B and Multivariate testing – ideally all newly designed pages, or pages that have had major changes need to be tested.
• Personas and user stories – User stories need to be created when a new page is designed to ensure that the personas of the site are catered for.
• Analytics – conversion points will need to be agreed upon. The analytics need to be in place so that you can measure success of the page but also you need to be sure of what constitutes success. Is it more sign-ups, more subscriptions or more feed subscribers?

Defining design of page elements

• Paper Prototyping – before changes are made, work out the layout on paper and communicate with other team members, it allows honest critique and rapid iteration. It also keeps the team from being married to one solution
• Pattern library – use design patterns to help formulate ideas and use designs that have been utilised elsewhere in other markets
• Taxonomy and site structure - taxonomy and controlled vocabulary needs to be referred to whenever site structures are changed and this need to be reflected in these two documents. Managing taxonomies is a core part of website management
• Gauging Usability
• Heuristic evaluation checklist – offers the ability to look at any page and define the areas that either pass or fail usability requirements
• Ethnography or beta testing – either observe users in person and record their behaviour or create user groups who are in dialogue with the site manager and feedback their experiences in using designated test areas.
• Usability capture software – observe and record users from another location using software that records and analyses the user behaviour

Ensuring Findability

(Thanks to Rob Fisher for this section)

SEM – Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a holistic term used to describe the practice of promoting websites by increasing their visibility within search engines. The term, SEM in recent years has been increasingly associated with only PPC and Paid Inclusion.

PPC – Pay Per Click is an advertising model used on many Search Engines to distribute contextually relevant advertising against a set of search results. The PPC advertising model is one of the most trackable forms of advertising available.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of promoting websites through organic search results. SEO looks to package website content in such a way as to make it easily accessible for users and search engines crawlers as possible.

Landing Pages – The creation of landing pages is an SEO technique used to target terms within the Keyword Footprint. Landing pages are used to aggregate or signpost links to themed content and are designed to act as alternative points-of-entry to a website.

A holistic approach

The individual elements make the job of managing the website become easier as these techniques give a full picture of the site users and also their resulting behaviour online. The different methods help follow the principles of being user centred without the teams being bound up with process.

What the techniques deliver should give the teams enough knowledge that allows them to design, test and publish content with confidence.

I often refer back to Roy Tennant's quote,  "Librarians like to search, everyone else wants to find."  Since I do think this is true, I was interested to read Mark Hall's recent On the Mark post Finding, not searching is what really counts.  Thank you to Janice LaChance, SLA CEO, for pointing out this posting in her blog, Executive Connections.

Hall reports on the research being conducted by Carl Frappaolo, vice president of market intelligence for AIIM.  In summarizing a recent survey, Frappaolo reported that:

HIs survey, taken in May among 528 respondents, ... indicates 52% of business users acknowledge that the enterprise search process has gotten easier over the past two years, but half of them (49%) still find it difficult and time-consuming.

He also notes that "49% of any given company's employees were clueless on advanced search techniques, like Booleans or even multi-term queries." 

Frappaolo contends that "IT is "throwing a lot of good search tools at siloed content" and that the main problem is that "nobody owns the strategy for findability." 

Search is tough to get right in most organizations.  Besides there being no owner of strategy, other roadblocks exist:

• Most members of an organization, do not understand how search works, they just know that many times, it doesn't
• Leadership, who need to understand more detail to define and approve search projects and expenses, don't think there is a problem and don't have the time or interest to learn
• IT thinks putting a search strategy in place is a simple task - index, search, find
• Content owners don't think to share with one another or don't understand the value of their information to others
• Members of an organization may be working on the same issue, idea, project, etc and not know it

Knowledge management practitioners are in a unique position to help solve these problems, if they get the support, as their work crosses boundaries and silos in the organization.   Having done a knowledge audit, they can draw connections that would have otherwise remained unknown.  With this knowledge they can define the search/find strategy needed and then work with IT toward a successful solution that works for everyone.

Several past surveys by various firms support the need to improve search/find.  In 2005, Outsell, Inc. reported:

Today's professionals spend most of their time (53 percent) seeking out information. Four years ago, knowledge workers were able to spend 58 percent of their time analyzing and applying what they had found. Collectively, the time spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated. 5.4 billion lost hours per year for US corporations.

With these kinds of statistics, you would think corporate leadership would be very interested in finding a solution to improve efficiencies.

I am most likely "preaching to the choir" as most of you already know what I am talking about.  How do we get leadership and IT to understand that there is a way to quit focusing on searching and start focusing on finding?  While not the solution, I think we need to start by giving up our own love affair with Search and start learning more about Find.  Does anyone have next steps? 

An article with a different take on search: Foraging for Information with Search Search Insider, July 10, 2008

Having done user testing on taxonomies I've built a few times, I compare the feeling to what I imagine it's like a being an actor or actress watching yourself in a film.

Imagine you are Scarlett Johanssen (I often do), watching yourself in a film... You cringe at the sight of yourself on the big screen, pick apart your performance, thinking "I could have done it this way...", hear the audience laugh (or not) at jokes... And the pressure of the success of the movie weighs heavily - will it be a bomb? Will the production company go bezerk? Will I ever work again?

Ok, so taxonomy user testing is not quite that dramatic, but there are parallels. Watching users navigate a taxonomy I've built is always teeth clenching for me - I am constantly thinking, why are they clicking there? Are they blind? I should have gone with my first idea for that label... The client is going to freak when they find out that one of their star products is unfindable... Will I ever work again?

Of course, that's the whole point of user testing - to prevent the taxonomy from bombing.

I am always surprised at what I discover in these tests. Categories or labels that I thought were no-brainers can turn out to be black holes of findability. Often this is related to how the taxonomy plays out as a whole in a users' eyes, rather than the specifics of a particular category. When we build taxonomies, we can get very focused on individual labels and categories and neglect the interplay between different terms across the entire structure. The "stickiness" (or lack thereof) of a particular concept or label can severely affect the performance of other seemingly unrelated categories - a ripple effect of sorts.

For example, a recent test on a toy taxonomy had an interesting ripple effect... One of the labels in the taxonomy included the word "pet". This term turned out to be so sticky that users looked for any product that even remotely resembled an animal in this category, regardless of how well it matched the product.

User testing also tends to enlighten stakeholders around the dangers of using internal terminology or organizing principles on the customer-facing web. Sometimes clients can be very reluctant to change categories or terms that they have been using for a long time or that represent how they understand their product line internally. They believe customers think the same way and can't commit to change until hard data proves that users don't care, don't understand, or are just plain wrong about particular terms.

I am big fan of Steve Krug's testing motto: test early and test often. From the taxonomist's point of view, user testing can be a mix of cringe-worthy moments and fist-pumping "I knew it"s. But there is nothing better than getting real users to point out the flaws and successes in your taxonomy.

For more on taxonomy usability testing, you can download our recent webinar on the topic from our site.

Top 10 Search Providers for May 2008, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)

 Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search

How Do Search Engines Work?

• Search engines collect all of the words on each web page taking note of where they are placed on the page and how they are formatted
• Search engines look at all of the pages on the web and take note of how they are connected and the themes running through them
• The engines don’t think, they simply use pattern matching and scoring attributes.

What is a SEO Algorithm?

• Top Secret!  Only select employees of a search engines company know for certain
• Reverse engineering, research and experiments gives SEOs (search engine optimization professionals) a “pretty good” idea of the major factors and approximate weight assignments
• The SEO algorithm is constantly changed, tweaked & updated
• Websites and documents being searched are also constantly changing
• Varies by Search Engine – some give more weight to on-page factors, some to link popularity

Site Submission

Google:  www.google.com/addurl.html 
Yahoo:  http://search.yahoo.com/info.submit.html   
MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
AOL
Inktomi 
Ask Jeeves 
DMOZ
Submit Express: www.submitexpress.com

SEO Page Elements

Page Title
– The single most important element on a web page for SEO
Each page should have an unique title Description Meta tags
– May appear in the search results snippet
– Should utilize important keywords
– Each page should have an unique description 
Header tags
– Provide additional information to the search engine of what the page is about
– Content
Must include keywords
The first 250 words are the most important

Robots Exclusion

Robots.txt File
- Place in server’s root directory
- Two elements: User-agent, Disallow

Example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /images/

Meta-Tag Robots Exclusion
<head><meta name=“robots” content=“no index, nofollow”></head>

Site map

Create a Site Map
• HTML page on your site with text links 
Create a Sitemap
• An XML file that lists your site’s URLs
• Allows crawlers to analyzes information about your site’s architecture to improve crawling
• Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
• Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
• Site Maps Protocol: http://www.sitemaps.org/
• Windows Live Search  http://webmaster.live.com 
• Ask http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters

Writing Tips for Search

• Do your keyword research. Think like your audience and be specific.
• Look at each page in your site — what words do you think are relevant for each page? Now look again at the pages — are you actually using these words?  Try searching your own site for these words. If you can't find them, search engines won't.
• Choose one keyword phrase that is targeted for each page
• Include each keyword phrase three to four times each within your copy — more if it makes sense. If your text sounds “awkward” to you, slice your keyword phrase usage.
• Use the exact term — “small business accounting software” is not the same as “accounting software for small business”.
• The first 250 words on a page are the most important. Search engines prefer body text that contains 300 to 500 words per page. The longer the better opportunity for keyword placement that sounds good — your text always needs to sound natural.

Accessibility roadblocks

• Flash based pages
• Javascript navigation
• SSL and authentication requirements
• Firewalls & closed ports
• Forms requiring data validation
• Cookies and session IDs

Ranking factors

On-Page Factors (Code & Content)

• Title tags <title> #3
• Header tags <h1> #5
• ALT image tags #4
• Content, Content, Content (Body text) <body> #1
• Hyperlink text #6
• Keyword frequency & density  #2

Off-Page Factors

• Link Popularity (“votes” for your site) – adds credibility #2
• Anchor text #1

Basic Tips & Optimization Techniques

• Research keywords related to your business; Use Google Trends to find two or three terms that relate to your subject;  Include these terms in your headline and first two paragraphs
• Identify competitors, utilize benchmarking techniques and identify level of competition
• Utilize descriptive title tags for each page
• Ensure that your text is HTML-text and not image text
• Add hyperlinks to help people find interesting, related content; Use text links when ever possible
• Use appropriate keywords in your content and internal hyperlinks (don’t overdo!)
• Obtain inbound links from related websites
• Monitor your search engine rankings and more importantly your website traffic statistics and sales/leads produced
• Educate yourself about search engine marketing

Links

– www.seomoz.org
– www.searchengineland.com
– www.searchenginewatch.com
– http://www.webmasterworld.com

Google does its thing very well. Few would argue with that. Alex suggests that semantic search should do something completely different...

To really showcase semantic search, these companies need to come up with innovative UIs that will help users to understand the power that is being put at their fingers.

I also think it should display results differently, the interface should encourage an exploratory experience and allow lateral thought to occur during research. Iskold states we should move away from  the search box, as this is the wrong type of input for a user.

Search Patterns

Peter Morville is currently producing a book on search patterns and this will also highlight how facetted navigation enables the user to experience a different search journey. He has made the slides available here on Flickr.

If you look at the core of what should be shown is the relationships between items, that give relevance to the user's query. Somehow a system needs to be designed that will reveal elements that have relationships and connections. Ontologies could be made, linking different data sets as if they were relational databases.

If a user found truly relevant and accurate information around an entity then a business objective could be fulfilled. Really targeted advertising would occur. Users are often more forgiving of adverts if what they see is relevant.

Images as a search device

But the challenge is in the interface, how do you convey a fluid, 'noosphere', visually? It has to be visual because the variety of content types are so different, and to scan and associate quickly - images could allow instant recognition.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth

Recently Mike Laurie wrote a post about the use of video, virals and such like and he ended the post highlighting the Photosynth software developed by Microsoft. The video shows the potential of this software and it’s impressive. One quality is the ability of a system to collate images from Flickr that have been tagged with recognised terms and build those images around a 3D model.

Another element is the resolution of some of these images is 300 megapixels allowing a user to zoom right into them and read or see the contents.

Photosynth showing Flickr images mapped to 3D models of the subject

If you think about this collation of files that have been tagged by a massive variety of users (from Flickr in this instance), it seems to be a big step to Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the semantic web.

Sure these are only pictures, they are not documents, however when you think about the metadata in the file and how this can be organised to conform to a widely accepted mental model then this is really exciting.

An interactive mental model

Imagine an interactive concept model around a physical object, you could extract the related items around this and draw relationships between inter-linked entities. I recently designed a taxonomy for a science magazine, and it had to encompass every type of science from physics to psychology to civil engineering. How would you draw relationships between these fields?

Well, what I like about this model is that this would be a visual representation of a knowledge landscape (in this case using images) that could easily be with video, audio and standard web pages. It would also be a 3d representation that would encourage digital discovery.

At the moment it is perhaps too flexible for your average user, but give it time. As more digital natives reach maturity and form the majority of the browsing public, this interface will not phase them at all.

Google's repository of human entered queries

We have a vast amount of data against document types about relationships between one and another, search engines have log files where keywords and most relevant results are displayed.

Around any search, even if it is a mathematical equation, there is a physical object that can be related to it. Be it the theory's creator, university, or even the theory itself the physical entity (or even known concept) could form the basis of the visual model.

If we truly want to move towards a semantic web than this type of interface would offer a rich, interactive and flexible approach to showing layers of detail that would encourage digital discovery and serendipitous finding.

Producing a list of most relevant links is still a compromise to what we could display to our users. It could be far better to show a knowledge landscape for each query where there are paths to other areas of knowledge and layers of related data that can be sorted by a series of user interactions.

In a way Microsoft has produced a microfiche for the 21st century, the difference though is the librarians that have tagged it are now the users of the system and they create the content. The machine has enabled the creation of something that is entirely user  generated but it will also help in organising this huge potential of harnessing the world’s knowledge.

Consider how Google are also integrating wikipedia entries to their maps and geo-locating photographs. By using the map, as mental model in this case, they are merely super imposing extra data types directly onto the two dimensional base.

Perhaps this is the greatest challenge to interaction designers and visual thinkers. Visually represent the knowledge available from an interlinked network of sources that are authorities around a subject area. As Alex Isold points out we are far from the solution yet.

The problem was, to enable users (internal staff and external consumers) to be able to find what they needed and to discover content serendipitously, the metadata needed to be rigorously structured and adhere to recognised standards.

Various kinds of metadata were important to the sharing and re-use of articles, and this post will highlight these areas and also illustrate how we incorporated these into the metadata schema.

Purpose of metadata

The lack of metadata in a file, adversely affects search engine retrieval but also the working efficiency in collaborative teams. Data is lost, assets are not published and effort in creation is wasted. Ensuring effective metadata implementation in the documents we create and publish results in gaining competitive advantage in the search domain but also an increased efficiency in our working practice.

Without metadata management intellectual property rights become eroded, and liability increases. Files such as an image, PDF, video or audio all need to be tagged to provide the user or employee a method in finding valuable content.

A set of Metadata Standards should govern the implementation of consistent and uniform metadata architecture. Consistency in metadata is important to enable information sharing across an organisation and to make optimal use of document management tools which rely upon this.

Metadata Organisations and file formats

For metadata to be effective, it must be incorporated into the workflow from creation to publication. This emphasises the importance of any content producer making a concerted effort to synchronise their information management.

There are significant contributors in metadata standards and after analysis the following organisation’s standards formed a basis for the metadata schema.

These are:

• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
• International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
• Publishing Requirements for Industry Standards Metadata (PRISM)

These standards are evident in the following formats that create types of metadata:

• Adobe Software’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)
• Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF)
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)

To aid in classification of file format types we used the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to give us a definitive list of file types. Its list, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) covers various formats that were used and may be used in the future. All other taxonomical types of labels (countries, regions etc) we looked towards the ISO for their classifications.

The types of metadata

There are four main areas of metadata in terms of semantic grouping.

These are:

• Descriptive metadata – Describes the contents of a file
• Administrative metadata – Data that can not be retrieved or inferred from the content and pertains to management of the content within a system
• Rights metadata – Asserts the ownership of the content, who owns it and who may distribute it and usually pertains to the usage of the document.
• Technical metadata – data about the physical properties of the content

All four areas have specific use for different reasons. The descriptive quality helps the item properties to be found either by search or by a user interface element on the page. This can be online and also offline in an application such as Adobe Bridge.

Drafting a schema

The schema was designed to incorporate the four main uses of metadata. These different facets to metadata result in different uses throughout the workflow of a publishing process.

These are revealed through tools the Adobe suite of applications and in the content of the websites where the ability to find our information is paramount to the quality of the user experience. The importance of classifying different aspects of our content is becoming increasingly important as new technologies based on the XML platform come into fruition.

The properties are unique and their use is dependent upon the content of the resource that is being tagged.

The list below outlines what we thought was of most use to be tagged from the moment content was created to the moment it became published.

The image below shows exactly how these fields are applied in practice.

Risks of not managing your metadata

Unless a unified metadata strategy is initiated there are risks that;

1. The data communication between enterprise applications will be flawed. Thereby negating any efficiency that may be gained through hardware upgrades, workflow will be inefficient, content will reside in silos .

1. The investment of designing taxonomies needs to be implemented at a technical level and this requires taxonomy management and data architecture. Not following up the investment of a metadata implementation by employing a data architect or someone responsible for metadata management is a critical weakness in the enterprise's information management.

1. Little or no use can be made of existing content and it often presents a valuable commercial resource. As the file has substandard metadata we immediately lose our content but we need to profit from its creation and value. Without a way of implementing a schema, content is effectively lost as soon as it is created.

With so many content creators working daily, the management of this information is our most important challenge. The content needs to be found easily, both internally amongst colleagues and externally amongst users.

The future

Certain properties in the schema pave the way for future search technologies. For instance entity type (such as brand, product, location, event) are complex in their variety. However this label allows that complexity of context to be stated and clarified.

Perhaps its for this reason that I see metadata being the foundation of semantic search. Only with a rich metadata schema that incorporates several different facets will we start to enjoy highly advanced searches over content that has inherent relationships. The challenge for interaction  and interface designers is to design the interface to be intuitive and allow searching in a unique, non-text field way, that is more exploratory than is possible at present.

Optimising images enables;

• · speedy retrieval of images from within an image archive
• · resource sharing across different departments or companies, allowing a greater library of images available to all
• · Metadata inclusion within the files themselves. Enabling a higher level of findability when the files are used online within websites

To ensure that this occurs, guidelines should be followed by the image creators and those who manage the administration of these images. As tagging images can be highly subjective the guidelines drawn up here are designed to be quick and simple to create within the Photoshop File info panel.There are four main fields that need descriptive information to ensure images hold metadata that will provide SEO benefit and enable the files to be found easily.The fields are;

• · OBJECT – What the image is of. Is it a person, animal, logo, building or machinery?
• · LOCATION – Where the photograph was taken, this is an entity type that helps searching for specific images around a subject area by specifying geographic place. For images such as graphics, this descriptor will not be necessary.
• · DATE – The date on which the image was created.
• · REASON – The purpose for the image being created and what the image illustrates (seen in the description field below). This is another entity type.
• · KEYWORDS – This enables searching for the image within an archive and externally

The image above has been taken for use in a magazine and online. As it is a generic image of food there is also a good chance that it could be searched for. Once the image has been downloaded from the camera it is here where the initial information needs to be added via an application, preferably Photoshop.Using the File Info command a box will appear like the example shown below. Within the first option, Description, all the metadata can be added that will aid SEO and will be maintained when taken into other applications such as Fotoware. The first option in the menu (description) uses the metadata to populate other areas, such as IPTC info areas further down the option list.

Photoshop File Info Interface

1. Document title field

This is effectively the OBJECT attribute mentioned earlier. It must be a concise description of the image contents in as few words as is possible. This will also form the JPG file name and for this reason has important SEO implications. In this example the image is called rhubarb_diced.jpg. The author’s information can also be added under this field.

2. Description field

This is the area that holds information about the LOCATION and REASON for the image’s existence. It also holds information regarding the DATE. The description should be targeted and concise. The description field should not be used as a further way to inform the art editors on the picture’s usage. This should be done in a separate document as all date within file info refers to metadata and will remain with the image after it has left the production desk.

3. Keywords field

For search engine optimisation and search through the Fotoware’s online interface - FotoWeb. These keywords are really important as they define the ease in which a user can find the appropriate image.

The image above shows a user searching for images that have been tagged ‘Langley Vale Farm’ and Fotoweb has returned 640 results. To narrow the search the categories list on the left hand side enables a user to drill down into results that have been put into relevant sections.

Clicking on ‘Land’ enables the user to see the 18 images that have the keywords associated to them. Clicking on a thumbnail allows the user to preview the image and also to examine the metadata. Here we can see that the term ‘Langley Vale’ has revealed the image of the farm on the Langley Vale estate.

4. Copyright field

It is important that the correct copyright information is displayed and Photoshop can help ratify if a copyright license agreement is in place. The © logo will appear next to the file name of the Photoshop file. The file info panel will allow the creator or the picture editor to establish what copyright information is in place.

In Summary

Where possible, images should be tagged following the what (OBJECT), when (DATE), where (LOCATION) and why (REASON) of the image. Where images have rights management issues keywords and copyright information will help give a minimum standard to the tagging of images.If this data is within the JPEG of an image then there is a much higher chance of the images appearing in a search engine results page (SERP). Tagging images this way now, also helps in maintaining a standardised approach to tagging of images that will ensure placement in SERPs in the future as crawlers become more adept at reading metadata from different file types.

Ok a bizarre word to start off with. That grabbed the attention and yes, the talk covered links. But it was more about an explanation of IA, and as Hinton stated, 'moving the conversation about it forward'.

From the start Hinton mentions emergent theory and I think that's a very good place to start. If you look at the practice of Information Architecture it is very much in an emergence. It is only as old as web design itself.

He reminds us of where we have come from. With references and examples from the old way (Encyclopedia Britannica) to the new (Wikipedia). The closed expensive accurate way, to the open, inexpensive and 'close enough' way.

We experience spatial and semantic information. Links, categories and rules give us the context and the connection to these 'possibility spaces'. The link between these spaces defined as findability. However, Hinton states:

Findability is only useful in service of context and connection

He states the practice is a shared history of learning, and a community of practice. We are an emergent group. There are many new factors emerging within the context of the discipline which is still defining what it is.

Slide showing convergence of the elements of IA

Hinton explains that IA is just a part of user experience, alongside interaction design and usability. Peter Boersmo covers this in more detail here when talking about deep IA - though it is I feel different to Mathew Milan's idea of what deep IA is. Of the 'sister' disciplines, Hinton states that;

IA defines the relationships and connections between contexts. IXD is the interactive function within a given context. This overlap is seen in navigation...

I feel interaction design should move even closer to align with IA, they are inter-dependant. Perhaps we should be a part of the same discipline and converge.

Hinton looks again at the Web 2.0 darlings, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook and states that IA is occurring here in a big way. Its a type of architecture that is different to the top-down classifications of the past. However it is concrete and vitally important to the site success.

Hinton explains that IA can be a thing, an activity, a role, a practice and a title. No wonder people are confused when they hear what IA is, and perhaps we are becoming more confused as practitioners. Hinton reminds us it depends on the cultural context of where we operate in.

A key takeaway for me is a realisation that IA is not going to die, it will not go away. We will always need to know where we are going, we need to help people classify, sort, signpost illustrate the paths that they wish to take and can not find.

Perhaps we are information guides as much as digital architects, building online spaces. It is a desire to help sort chaos, to define some level of order to enable humans to collaborate and interact within communities for their benefit.

Hinton ended this excellent talk to a great conference with a quote from the author William Gibson. We will no longer distinguish between the digital and the real world as the population of digital natives become ever greater. He remarks that one day our grandchildren will look back on us as quaint - the way in which we defined real spaces from digital ones.

I have a strong feeling he will be proved right. I have no doubt we need to embrace this philosophy, forget about barriers and think about the different ways of organising and presenting information.

As Sir Tim Berners Lee stated recently,

The future is always in the past and for the web particularly. In a hundred years, 15 years will seem to be just the infancy of the web, when the semantic web wasn't even completely deployed.

Lets look forward to greater collaboration and a convergence of the physical with the digital. The need for the continuing expansion of the IA to incorporate all the different elements of UX is critical to the success of our work, and our discipline.

Visitd bloggersblog through my twittr stream http://snurl.com/25t6q [twitter_com] and read this post http://snurl.com/25t5r [www_bloggersblog_com] which referrd 2 this comment on http://snurl.com/25t5z [www_zeldman_com] about potential of a plug-in to time-associate lifestreams, microblogs, blogs: Flickr, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Twitter

read more | digg story

Enhancing Social Tagging using KO

AIIM Reader Survey on Findability

Market IQ is the quarterly market intelligence report from AIIM, the ECM (Enterprise Content Management) Association. In planning their next issue - on Findability - Director of Market Intelligence Dan Keldsen is asking interested parties - users and vendors - to comment upon their proposed content via his blog. Potential topics currently proposed include (there are more listed on the blog):

• Aligning Your Solution to Your Content Community and Context
• Positioning Findability as the forefront of Business Effectiveness
• Strategic Uses of Search,Taxonomy and Tagging
• Defining & Differentiating Search, Browse,Tagging,Taxonomy
• Positioning Search and Tagging in a Information Architecture
• Enterprise Search - A Myth?
• The Role of Findability in Social Computing and Enterprise 2.0

Anyone who would like to comment can do so freely at Dan Keldsen's blog.

◊◊◊◊◊

JISC Innovation Award

Records management is making a bid to emerge from the shadowy backroom it inhabits for many observers, and to join the mainstream of information management. And rightly so. The JISC Innovation Award is designed to be one way of encouraging this.

The two winners of the Award this year were Gloucestershire College and the University of Abertay at Dundee. The latter in particular, has made the benefit of KO apparent right across the organisation, by applying a records management approach to developing a taxonomy which, JISC says, "has transformed the structure and quality of resource discovery within their intranet..."

A description of the Abertay project can be downloaded as a PDF from the JISC InfoNet site.

◊◊◊◊◊

Enhancing Social Tagging using KO

ISKO UK member Koraljka Golub is involved in the EnTag project at UKOLN, which is investigating ways of enhancing social tagging via knowledge organization systems, with a view to improving the quality of tags for increased information discovery and retrieval performance. Benefits of using both social tags and controlled terms are also being explored, including enriching knowledge organization systems with new
concepts.
{Relayed from a posting to the DC-SOCIAL-TAGGING mailing list, dated 2008-04-20}

Is the EnTag Project a possible topic for a future ISKO UK seminar, anyone?

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

"When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click.

What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at."

Krug de poursuivre: "if one wants to design effective Web pages, there are three facts about real-world Web use to consider:

1. We don’t read pages. We scan them.

Why? Because:

2. We don’t make optimal choices. We satisfice.

Why? Because:

3. We don’t figure out how things work. We muddle through.

Why? Because:

Thanks to twitter and Steve Rubel's lifestream for bringing this article to my attention.

"digg.com blurb: "Some professional bloggers complain of physical and emotional strain created by an Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment."

read more | digg story

This reminded me of an article by Kate Argyle (1996) in Rob Shields useful anthology entitled Cultures of the Internet. Argyle's account of what happens when a member of a virtual community dies challenged notions of that Internet communities were blasé and that the Internet itself fostered  a culture of distance and indifference. See http://www.socresonline.org.uk/1/3/van_loon.html

Webliography and bibliography

Argyle, Kate. 1996. "Death on the Internet." in Shields, Rob. 1996. Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. Chapter 8. London: Sage. ISBN 0 8039 7519 8

Taxonomies on business-to-business websites are industry based around the communities that interact with their content. The problem that many sites find is that the content can evolve and the taxonomy can not adjust to changes in what the content creators produce, or with what advertisers wish to sponsor, with regards to useful popular content.

Taxonomies should not be a snapshot in time but should be a living reflection of the markets they represent.

Taxonomy creep

This ‘taxonomy creep’ can only be combated by frequent reviews by people who have most contact with the site content. Usually this would be the website manager working with the site content creators and other specialists.

Taxonomy creep inevitably occurs to all sites and there is a need to be able to monitor and adjust the taxonomies without impacting on the user experience or the workflow of the content producers.

Here I propose to set out a process that businesses can employ that will ensure their taxonomies are accurate. That they reflect the industry, user groups and business objectives of the site and will utilize their web technologies and people available.

This process recognizes the evolving nature of what we produce  and ensures that the users will find the content, enhancing their experience on sites.

Benefits of a search technology

Various types of software can automatically search a site’s content and map it to nodes in an existing industry taxonomy. This taxonomy is has been built primarily for the global search engine crawlers and so has a generic take on industry topics.

This forms a good basis for industry taxonomies within business to business websites and from there we can take research findings, personas, keyword research and the product team’s industry knowledge and any future content proposition plans, to inform the site specific taxonomy.

This bespoke taxonomy, with a targeted categorization rule base, allows the content to be categorized in a manner that is accurate (using a categorization tool) and automatic.

Many search technologies are designed to work so they operate globally, categorizing and indexing millions of pages to robust taxonomies, to enable users to find information from around the web. Using this feature within a site enables the search engine to aggregate content around topic areas that can be used to provide users with extra valuable information.

With a site specific taxonomy (SST) and a search engine taxonomy (SET) combined, extra features can be employed onto the site.

1. Landing pages can be automatically created on agreed terms that have been highlighted by site owners.
2. Pages can be tagged using contextual links to point to these pages automatically, using words or phrases pre-determined by the SEO team and the site managers.
3. There is an ability to list articles by author and show related content. By displaying tags alongside an article that points to a landing page or takes the user to specific search results pages on that topic - relevance is increased.
4. The SET is also enhanced as it can take the new categories back to the global indexing engine.

With this increased level of user interaction the amount of pages that will be viewed will rise.

However, the key qualities in this assumption are relevancy and timeliness.

Different situations will require a different weighting but relevance will always be the key to a serendipitous user experience.

The relevance, or ‘aboutness’ of a page is driven by the ability of the website CMS to categorize content automatically and accurately and in some situations extra coding will be required for the formulation of rules (within the classification engine) to be able to do this accurately.

The review process explained

Step 1 - Look at existing taxonomy and identify gaps.

Gaps will be highlighted by documents created by specialists such as an IA, an SEO expert or a site manager (taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, content proposition plans and navigation schemes).

In publishing websites, journalists may alert editors that articles are not being classified correctly and a mapping of the SET to the SST would occur.

Mapping the SET ensures that we gain a perspective from the industry, then the content producers will align their view on the subject matter backed up by the research documents mentioned above.

Finally, by using research on the users (personas, web metrics and keyword research) we can ensure that the suggested new SST sits well. This ensures the content, users and business context are addressed.

Step 2 – Creation and consolidation of categories and rule development

After the gap analysis of the SST it may be the case that new categories need to be created and rules written for the SET categorisation tool. Bespoke channels may also need to be addressed within the presentation of the site through the UI but these areas will also be a part of the SST. This ensures all useful content will be retrievable through search and browsing.

At this stage the corpus is tested against the SET categorisation tool using existing rules. Results of the test will allow us to deem if it is necessary to create new categories within the SET and in turn the SST.

It may also be evident that certain categories need consolidating as there is not enough content to occupy these areas. This needs to be executed in a considered manner, with a view to future proof if possible, as tweaking a navigation item in the UI will lead to user confusion.

Once this sequence of work is complete the new rules can be developed (if necessary).

Step 3 – Testing stage

The corpus is tested against the SET categorisation tool using the new rules. This will result in the corpus being reclassified to the new topics in the site taxonomy.

The results of the categorisation will need to be checked by taking a random selection and seeing that they are categorised to a standard that the team is happy with.

Step 4 – Quality Assurance

If the results are judged to be inadequate the team, or a 3rd party resource, (depending on budget / complexity) refines the new rules and then uses the SET categorisation tool to reclassify documents again until the results returned are deemed satisfactory.

Step 5 – Quarterly Review

Once implemented the taxonomy will need to be revisited in three months and the sequence begins again.

Who should be involved with the process?

A review every quarter should be a key task for every website manager or product owner. They will need to set up a reporting procedure when the categorisation fails and this would be recorded and analysed as part of the review process. It may be a spreadsheet with the article ID and then the details are listed. Though this may be initially demanding on their time it will improve the classification engine and improve the workflow within the team.

The search engine technology team need to be involved at all stages of the process, to enable testing of the rules base with the content. They also need to interact with the site web developers to ensure a test environment is present and they can report results.

SEO specialists would also be able to provide the website editor with a list of top keywords from which landing pages could be built. This list would also help inform the direction of the taxonomy and the naming of navigation items.

The user experience team would provide personas and the information architect would provide any documents relating to information organisation or site structure. The web analytics team will also provide usage stats of the site and how the users interact with it. This will help the web editor make decisions around consolidation, creation or naming of the taxonomy and navigation items. These specialists should be notified of any changes to the user interface which may occur through re-ordering of site categories.

Finally, and most importantly, content creators need to be in constant dialogue with the website managers to ensure the taxonomy supports the content that they are writing.

The long term view

Benefits of a smoother workflow and a better user experience in the long term outweighs any potential for labour intensive activity in the short term. There will be some initial work to do to get site taxonomies up to an adequate standard that the website manager, the content creators and the specialist teams can be happy with.

By implementing a taxonomy creation and maintenance strategy, one can be confident that the auto categorization of content will be findable by the user and will be accurately referenced within the site architecture.