We’ll skip to step three because you don’t need me to spend time ranting about defining your purpose. If you can’t figure that step out, no amount of web marketing advice will help you succeed. You either sell, service, entertain, inform, warn, promote, identify, locate, socialize, or some combination of these.
Once you’ve determined your subject and purpose, you need an information architecture. An AI is exactly what it sounds like. It is the diagram of how your site’s information will be structured. Essentially, it functions like a pyramid. The home page is tier one. Your main navigation contains tier two (usually something like About Us, Products, Services, Blog, Contact Us, etc). Most of your second tier pages will drill down to multiple more specific pages in tier three. Tier three pages may drill down to multiple even more specific pages in tier four. And so on.
Each tier is a set of sub topics of the tier one level up. Keep your information organized by theme. In most instances, all like-subject pages should dwell within the same group. Dogs and dog breeds and dog breed characteristics should all be easily found one after another, stepping down from one tier to the next. You should have to hunt for dog breed characteristics under a separate section called Man’s Best Friend. Keep in mind that the goal every time is to make accessing information an easy, intuitive exercise for your visitors. Whatever makes the most common sense is what you should do.
As you create your information architecture, this is also where you assign names to each page. This is important because these page names will ideally be the only thing after the “.com/” in your URL for optimization purposes. Keyword phrases are essential. For that reason, you will either do your keyword research prior to this step or you will revisit your IA afterwards and edit your page names.
Keep in mind that anything deeper than three levels will not likely be visited as often by visitors who enter through your home page because users want to find what they’re after fast. Search engines, however, will deliver users to your deepest page if it is indexed and authoritative on a given subject. In the off chance that your company automatically receives more traffic through the home page via direct visits (if your brand name is extremely popular), then you will need to pay extra attention to site search functionality and ease-of-use for deep content.
