It's easy for laymen to develop the impression that search engine optimization is about keywords and tag and such, but I came across o very interesting article the other day by David Snyder that looks at a more foundational concept: information architecture.

According to Snyder:

One of the most overlooked concepts in the construction of a website is how the information for that website will be structured. Too often the organization of this information is constructed without any usability or search engine optimization in mind.

In other words, keywords and link exchanges only go so far in promoting a poorly designed website. And a website's design can in and of itself prevent it from getting more than a mediocre page rank.

People just don't use websites that aren't, well, usable. IN Snyder's words, poor information environment design will lead to user abandonment, due to poor or counter intuitive navigation. Think about how often you get fed up with a website's design and just click the red X...

You can read Snyder's piece here.


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