Navigation Design and SEO for Content-Intensive Websites

A Guide for an Efficient Digital Communication

Mario Pérez-Montoro, Lluís Codina

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780081006764
• eBook ISBN: 9780081006771
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Navigation Design and SEO for Content-Intensive Websites: A Guide for an Efficient Digital Communication presents the characteristics and principal guidelines for the analysis and design of efficient navigation and information access systems on content-intensive websites, such as magazines and other media publications. Furthermore, the book aims to present the tools of information processing, including information architecture (IA) and content categorization systems, so that such designs can ensure a good navigation experience based on the semantic relations between content items. The book also presents best practices in the design of information access systems with regard to their main structures, including search query forms and search result pages. Finally, the book describes the foundations of search engine optimization (SEO), emphasizing SEO oriented to publications focused on communication and the coverage of current affairs, including images and videos. - Focuses on the newly emerging and significant sector of content characterized by its use of multimedia: text, image and video - Presents comprehensive coverage of sites and their combined information architecture and SEO needs - Explores an analysis of existing best practices to offer operational proposals for the development of digital news and current affairs publications - Analyzes academic studies by scholars working in this field

Chapter 1

Content-Intensive Sites

Abstract

The main objective of this chapter is to introduce the concept of content-intensive Websites, since it is precisely this type of Website, and its content-heavy Web pages, to which the various concepts, ideas and techniques that we present in this book are best applied.

Next, we discuss the relationship between content-intensive Websites and the contributions made by library and information science to the universe of the World Wide Web. We conclude by providing a brief presentation of the overall content of this book, describing the subjects addressed in each of the remaining six chapters.

Keywords

Content-intensive Websites; Information architecture; Information-intensive Websites; Library and information science (LIS); Search engine optimization (SEO)

1.1. Introduction

The main objective of this chapter is to introduce the concept of content-intensive Websites (or information-intensive Websites), since it is precisely this type of Website, and its content-heavy Web pages, to which the various concepts, ideas and techniques that we present in this book are best applied.

Next, we discuss the relationship between content-intensive Websites and the contributions made by library and information science to the universe of the World Wide Web. We conclude by providing a brief presentation of the overall content of this book, describing the subjects addressed in each of the remaining six chapters.

1.2. Characterization of Content-Intensive Sites

Content-intensive sites (CISs) are characterized by the fact that they belong to organizations that naturally produce large volumes of information. That is, they produce this content not as a result of having to come up with strategies to fill their Website, as might be the case of other types of organization (we refer to the majority of firms operating in the business world, for example), but simply because they cannot not create it. In other words, they would cease to fulfil a fundamental part of their mission if they stopped creating content.

Generally speaking, there are three main types of organizations that present this characteristic: the media, universities and museums. We do not automatically rule out the possibility of there being other classes, but given the widespread presence of these three in any moderately developed society, their great social significance and their impact on knowledge, they are by far the most important.

The three types of institutions share a series of characteristics of enormous significance. First, the kind of information they produce and manage is of the broadest social interest and reach. Second, in their fields, they produce and manage information that enhances cultural quality and promotes the advancement of a nation’s knowledge (and their coming together in an international system, of course, improves the cultural quality and promotes the knowledge of mankind as a whole). Finally, in an era of unabated changes that can be traced to the beginning of the industrial revolution, they are three examples of centuries-old institutions that, despite suffering periodic crises, do not appear to be near the end of their existence; on the contrary, they would appear to be as strong as ever.

Briefly, the media provide the channels by which society, since at least the 18th century, has kept itself informed about what is going on around it and, since at least the beginning of the 20th century, it has been a formidable instrument in the defence of democracy in its role of keeping a watchful eye on those in power and, indeed, is often referred to as the ‘fourth power’. Today, there is a widespread consensus that active, well-informed citizens thanks to a high-quality, free press are, in turn, the foundation of a strong democracy.

The universities, for their part, have been responsible, since the Middle Ages, for a dual function whose importance cannot be exaggerated: the dissemination of knowledge and the creation of new knowledge. As if this were not enough, they house the great university libraries, or as is preferred in more modern circles, resource centres for learning and research.

Finally, the museums, in existence since the beginning of the 18th century, fulfil the function of the preservation of our tangible and intangible cultural heritage and of making it available not only to researchers and scholars but to society as a whole. Their permanent collections form a massive archive whose digitization and documentation represent an invaluable and, fortunately, vast source of information and knowledge.

While to an outside observer of the world of both search engine optimization (SEO) and the library and information sciences, these three types of organizations might appear to have little in common, we would claim (summing up what we have said so far) that they are institutions that share a number of important characteristics. First, all three are deeply rooted in their respective societies. Second, they generate a wide variety of information as part of their natural activities. Third, their information is of broad social interest. They also generate multimedia information, that is, they produce content covering the entire spectrum of information morphologies (text, image, sound and video); and, more recently, they have begun to generate interactive content, linked even to augmented and virtual realities. Finally, all three are heavily conditioned to ensure that their contents are of quality and meet essential requirements of validity.

These characteristics endow the three institutions with an essential difference in relation to aspects of information architecture and of SEO. They all produce content of high semantic and cognitive value. Indeed, the multimedia information characteristic of the news media, universities and museums is extremely rich in semantic features and presents a significant cognitive dimension because it affects the higher-level functions of our cognition: the monitoring of what is going on around us, our artistic and scientific heritage and the generation and dissemination of knowledge.

Having said that, we should stress that the three categories do not exhaust the list of such sites, and that it is by no means a closed list. The sites form a set that cannot be defined by its extension but only by a certain affinity and, therefore, we cannot hope to provide a fixed list of sites that belong to this set.

CISs contrast most markedly with the sites of small- and medium-sized ‘conventional’ e-commerce firms and with most informational Websites for the products and services of companies of all sizes. However, the distinction we draw between e-commerce sites, on the one hand, and CISs, on the other, is imperfect, because as we show that there is an increasing number of e-commerce sites that share many of the features of CISs.

1.2.1. Mixed Systems

Having outlined what we consider to be the ‘pure’ category of CISs, we should hasten to clarify that there are systems in e-commerce that share many of their features.

These are Websites that go beyond the conventional e-commerce site or informational site for the products and services of a firm. We believe that there is a wide variety of such sites, and that the current business trend to move increasingly onto the Internet, or the cloud if you prefer, will mean that in the future these mixed sites, that is, originating in e-commerce but rich in content, will increase in number.

Examples of such sites include commercial image banks, such as those of the well-known firms Getty and Corbis, film and television databases, such as IMDB and AllMovie, and even global companies (in all senses) such as Amazon, and even large sector companies, such as Barnes & Noble.

Clearly all, or most, of what we might say about ‘pure’ CISs is applicable to these mixed sites, as we refer to them here. In both cases, we are dealing with sites that handle large volumes of content, most of it cognitive in type (be it image, text or audiovisual), that they need to produce as part of their natural functions or as part of their business model.

Given this gradual convergence, in this book when we refer to CISs we also take into consideration these so-called mixed sites, since to almost all intents and purposes they can be deemed equals for the subjects we discuss.

1.3. An Opportunity for Library and Information Science

From the perspective of library and information science (LIS), CISs and mixed sites are of great interest because they both require intense inputs from this field of study.

The reason for this is that LIS does not concern itself with just any kind of information. Indeed, information is the subject of study and the focus of many disciplines and professions. Biology, for example, is concerned with information (among other things) when it studies the laws of genetics, and so is mass communication, to choose a discipline at the other end of the academic spectrum, when it examines the messages circulating in the media.

Information is an ever-present facet in the life experience of human beings as individuals and also of human societies as a whole. People constantly exchange information with each other as part of their vital interaction with their fellow man. Society deals with huge amounts of information on a permanent basis and in real time, including, for example, city traffic and pollution data.

What exactly is the focus of interest of LIS in this overwhelming panorama presided over by the constant exchange of information? We believe that by examining our specific object of study we are able to recognize a number of characteristics that are at the same time unique and exclusive to the information that concerns us in the field of LIS.

First, LIS does not concern itself with just any kind of information, as we have been at pains to illustrate with the previous examples; rather, it concerns itself with information that is recorded in material supports, what we can refer to as documents.

For many years now LIS has not only focused its attention on printed documents and textual information. As mentioned, the concept of the document includes any kind of recorded material including digital supports and all types of information morphology, including text, image, video and sound. This means that LIS is not only concerned with monographs and articles in print magazines housed in libraries but also with computer records hosted in database systems.

Second, LIS does not concern itself with administrative information, such as that produced daily by millions of businesses and individuals around the globe, which means the balance sheets of a country’s companies are not to be found in libraries; rather, we have to visit the company archives or the nation’s historical archives (if the information is old) to find them.

The information that LIS does concern itself with, therefore, is what we might call cognitive information. This class of information, in contrast with administrative information, is to be found in the monographs and magazines acquired, catalogued and made available to the general public in centres such as libraries, as well as by the compilers of databases and other organizations in the world of LIS.

What is important for us is that CISs need to make full use of the intellectual and technological tools provided by LIS. By this we mean that the concepts and procedures presented in this book only acquire their full meaning in the context of CISs.

As modern content management systems (CMSs) have made manifest, information architecture design and the need to employ taxonomies are trivial concerns. The so-called predesigned themes with menus based on categories and tags, developed by the most important CMSs, can solve most of the problems that might affect a standard site, using well-established patterns.

The same cannot be said, however, for CISs and for content-rich sites similar to the CISs. Given their characteristics, these sites have a number of specific needs in relation to the concepts and ideas addressed in this book, which, in contrast, are not applicable to a classic e-commerce site or a typical content-poor site of a business or firm.

1.4. How the Book Is Structured

In this book, it is our understanding that information architecture (IA) (via its contribution to the design of navigation systems) and SEO occupy a privileged place in their applications to CISs (see the reasons outlined before). Likewise, we believe both IA and SEO occupy privileged places in the applications of LIS to the universe of the web.

In keeping with these beliefs, we can build an interesting triangle, with one side being formed by the World Wide Web, the second by LIS and the third by the partnership forged between AI + SEO. It is precisely this triangle that has served as our motivation to work and research in these areas at our respective universities, and it is these ideas that we now wish to make available in this book.

In Chapter 2, we analyse the bases on which the navigation system is founded and that allow a user to explore and locate information in web environments and on mobile devices. To do so, we organize the chapter into four sections. Firstly, we examine the subject of navigation in fairly broad terms. Specifically, the section begins by highlighting the basic importance of navigation and how this is manifest in web environments. We follow this by offering a complete definition of the navigation system. Finally, we round off the section by providing a series of recommendations (or heuristics) that can be followed to improve the design and implementation of a Website navigation system.

In the second section of this chapter, we show how the overall navigation system that can be found on a webpage is usually built up from different elements or subsystems. We examine this typology and describe the two basic navigation systems: embedded systems – constant, local and contextual systems; and supplementary systems – maps, indexes and guides. In the third section, we present the advanced or nonbasic systems – personalization systems, visual navigation systems and social navigation systems. And, in the fourth section, we examine the components that enable us to add extra ...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Series Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgment
• Chapter 1. Content-Intensive Sites
• Part One. Navigation Experience Design
• Part Two. Findability and Search Experience Optimization
• References and Further Reading
• Index