websense

Sorry for the late post - this is a session review from the recent SES show in San Jose.

Successful Site Architecture:
Review by Josh Best, Sales Specialist, The Karcher Group

There were two speakers for this SES session: Derrick Wheeler from Acxiom Digital and Matt Bailey.

Both had solid information and were entertaining presenters. In my opinion, a key element of a good session is the presenter’s ability to keep the crowd involved and interested. In this regard, both Derrick and Matt did a good job. Derek seemed to provide the nuts and bolts of how to build a site with good architecture, while Matt focused on the legal implications and provided examples of sites that lack successful architecture.

Here are some of the keys points and observations from each:

Derek Wheeler:

To have a successful site, you must have these 4 things to offer your users / search engines:

• proper site architecture
• quality content
• a unique web site
• a user friendly web site

An acronym to help you remember the process of your site within the search engines and your users: C.I.R.T.A.

• Crawl
• Index
• Rank
• Traffic
• Action

It’s better to have short, to the point URLS than it is to have longer, keyword stuffed URLS
Some things to avoid or watch out for:

• Robots.txt
• Search engine crawlers don’t accept cookies
• Sessions IDs can cause a problem with search engines. This is due to duplicate pages and URLs being created
• Javascript

As I mentioned before, I thought Matt’s presentation was more focused on showing examples of sites with good/not-so-good site architecture. Some of the examples used were the Target corporation website and the Prince Tennis website, among others.

Matt Bailey

• Web site submissions are a thing of the past
• Useful tools available to all are the Google Guidelines and the Accessibility Checklist through www.wc3.com
• If you require a mouse action as your first step to accessing your site information, a search engine crawler will not be able to get into your site to index your pages
• Pay attention to alt text. It can save you from many usability issues

I hope this brief overview shares some helpful insights and tips that were passed along @ SES San Jose.