When it comes to creating an organized, concise, and informative Web site for your Pittsburgh audience, content might be king, but layout is key.

The reason is simple: If your site is not attractive and highly navigable, visitors will not come back. There are literally thousands of Web designers — amateur and professional; specializing in search engine optimization (SEO), or e-commerce, or information design — out there. Each one believes that his or her design style and informational organization approach are the best in the Internet marketing business.

Most of them are wrong.

Have you ever visited a Web site or online business that had a very difficult-to-understand ethos, mission, or purpose? Think back to that site: Why was it so difficult to understand, and to navigate?

Was the back-navigation unclear? (According to expert Internet marketer and developer Steve Krug, author of “Don’t Make Me Think,” the ‘back’ button on a browser is the button most commonly used when navigating a Web site.)

Could you find what you needed or wanted to buy – or was what you wanted difficult to find?

Did the site load quickly, or was it bogged down by clunky Flash, slow PHP, or obscenely huge graphics?

Were you able to get to the page you wanted to view from other pages of the site? Or was navigation impeded by the lack of site map? Or did the search function on the page fail to return the results you requested?

There are many rules to making information architecture work for search engine optimization and Internet marketing.

Here are but a few of the time-tested truisms:

1. Content, the ruler of the SEO kingdom, should make its presence obvious, but light. The paragraph lengths and styles that you might have used in your college thesis are not appropriate for a commercial or informational Web site. As newspaper layout staff know all too well, text blocks are longer when the columns are narrower. Short paragraphs, appropriately highlighted text, and clean pages – pages free from textual clutter – are important to the success of your SEO efforts.

 

2. Make the hierarchy of pages obvious. Tabbed site navigations, obvious site maps, and visual cues announce to your visitors, “You are here, and this is why you are viewing this page.” Some of the biggest bummers users report when visiting a site is that they don’t know where they are, how they got there, or what they should do next. Avoid creating this kind of site. (SEO and Internet marketing bonus: HTML-rich site maps and navigation – especially those that are keyword-dense – help your pages to be crawled and indexed by search engines.)

 

3. Use “alt” descriptions for all of your pictures. Why? There are two good reasons to do this. First, if your viewer has his or her browser images turned off, he or she will still understand the purpose of the picture. Secondly, and more importantly, alt image tags are good for search engine optimization because they can be crawled by search engines. If you sell laptops and you have a picture of your laptops, name your picture “laptops” using the alt-image tag, and you’ll be ahead of the competition.

 

4. Conduct usability testing. This is another trick straight from the Steve Krug guidebook. Before you go live with your Web site (we hope you build in beta, and do lots of testing in-house before going live), conduct some usability testing. Block out time to test your site – get some Internet users in, have them click around, and ask them for their reactions. The responses will let you know immediately how “usable” your site is, and will allow you to make the necessary tweaks and changes before going live. And you’re not done yet, either: Continue to conduct usability tests throughout the life cycle of your Web site.

If you’re building a new site, SEO is your friend. Proper search engine optimization practices obviously allow your site to acquire a bigger, bolder Internet presence. But, as any Internet aficionado will tell you, SEO isn’t the whole picture. It is but one component of a highly usable Web site.

Information architecture is the other half of the Internet marketing equation.

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