What do we mean by this? Your site is nothing short of a set of containers into which you throw stuff. You may have containers inside of containers, but eventually you get down the the stuff that everyone has: Things. Whether your things are informational articles or products to sell or both, you must provide your readers with a clear and concise navigational paradigm to get them to these items. This is your navigation or architecture.

This navigational heirarchy is not just important for your readers and customers. It is important that you get this right for the search engines as well. When you decide upon your navigational architecture, i.e. the names that you will give your containers and what you will put in them, you are specifically detailing for the search engines as well as your customers what your target keywords are. And if you are using a Content Management System like our SwinginSarah CMS, your URLs are finely tuned to take advantage of the keyword density and positive SEO aspects of having those names in your URL. They are the titles and keywords in your meta tags, and should be the focus of the content and text that appears on that page.

While it is difficult to get this perfect from the get-go (or perhaps ever – we submit that you should consider this a work in progress at all times…), you can do a wonderful job of getting close by doing just a few simple things:

1. Check out the competition. While we definitely do not follow the rule “If everyone else is doing it, it must work”, we do not shy away from learning from others and appropriating where necessary. Often times there is no sense in re-inventing the wheel. If Wal-Mart carries it on their web site, take a look. Also, by defining who your competitors are and trying to understand what they are doing, you will be one step closer to dominating them online.

2. If you have it, use your common sense. Often we will see a client try to stuff products into categories all over their web site, when they clearly won’t do the same in their brick-and-mortar store. A coffee table book on beautiful fences surely belongs in your book department, but probably does not belong in your fence post category – which should specifically contain your fence posts.

3. Use the tools at your disposal. Tools readily available to you to do keyword research include the Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com, and your own POS system (what buying departments do you have set up already?)

4. Lastly, it is important to finalize your architecture and force your content manager to stick with the program. We have seen more than one client’s web site head off into the un-navigable due to the inability of their content manager to manage their own organizational skills. Eventually, their inability to maintain and manage the containers they were given led to a site with too many containers, unwieldy navigation, confusing links and lists and a whole host of other problems that reduced their site to a veritable mess.