A project I’m working on involves analysing a large amount of legacy web content and restructuring a public sector site with a new, straightforward, navigation. Findability and interesting, relevant content are key.
In parallel, I’ve been asked to improve the website’s performance in search engine results.
Being new to formal SEO, I started by looking at Nick Garner’s SEO success map, which he showed at WordCampUK 2008. I promptly gulped at the scope and asked the Twitterverse for their opinion. The responses were interesting:
- ‘Don’t we automatically do a lot of that anyway when building usable sites?’
- ‘You do SEO every day – you just don’t realise it’
- ‘seo is naturally writing relevant content in valid, accessible, semantic html’
- ‘I’ve done not one ounce of SEO’
- ‘Ignore it. Good start is to just be sensible’
- ‘That SEO map seems to ignore writing good stuff’
After mulling over these opinions, and with some really useful ideas from Adam Maltpress on SEO considerations specifically in the context of public sector websites, I pulled the strands together in a mindmap (pdf, 104kb).
I created the mindmap as a tool to help my thinking and planning, though I hope it’s general enough for others to use in planning how to build, restructure or develop their own web content.
The overarching ideas behind my approach are:
Limited resources
You have limited resources so you need to concentrate on areas you can control. I’ve broken the mindmap down into sections so you can make incremental improvements to specific areas.
Driven by content
Your strategy is content-driven. It’s all about writing interesting content that’s relevant to readers and optimising your site structure to make content findable.
Organic SEO
No sneaky tactics, no link exchange programs. The SEO benefits of a strategy like this will be the result of writing more interesting content that other people link to and a site structure search engines can crawl successfully.
Collaborate
I’ve shared the mindmap on Mindmeister (registration required to edit). Please feel free to add your own ideas or feedback, either within the map itself or through in the comments below.
Updated 13th November 2009: The mindmap was open to collaborative editing on Mindmeister.com. Somehow the map was edited into nonsense and beyond repair so I deleted it. Here’s a copy of the mindmap (pdf, 104kb).