original article by Joost de Valk
1. From Goal to Site Structure
Determining the goal for the site
- Who are your audience?
- What are you going to offer them
- Why would they be coming to your site
- Which actions do you want the to take
Write down all the things the site should do/contain.
Keyword Search
Keyword search has one goal only: to get you to understand how your visitors think and talk about your product/ service, so you can talk to them in their own language.
- Start simple: write down words that people use when they talk about your service.
- Once you have a list start using all the tools out there to make the list bigger: here is a great list of tools
- take all the data you get out of these tools with a grain of salt, the initial data you had is probably better: they’re real words used by real people.
- Keep keywords that are related together, so when you start structuring your site, you’ll have keyword groups ready already. Best way to do this is to make groups of “main” keywords with “sub” keywords
- If you know that certain keywords people are using to describe your product or service are very competitive, make sure you find all the keywords surrounding that topic. You’ll use these later on for something that is often referred to as “keyword clustering”.
Site Structure
Site structure is as much a science as it is an art. There are so many things to keep in mind that the task can become daunting.
Like buildings, web sites have architectures that cause us to react. (Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld)
It’s not just your design, it’s not just your content, it is how you structure your content as well that determines whether your site has any chance at all of being a success.
- Determine which keywords are your most important ones and make those your top-level pages. I usually do this in Excel: each column represents a level of your site, each row a page. This looks something like this:
- Each of those keywords get’s it’s own page. Of course some keywords don’t deserve their own page, but keep in mind that it’s a lot easier to rank for a keyword if you are able to totally focus the page on that keyword.
- Remember those words you jotted down that were often used to describe certain terms? Add them into this site structure: create an extra column on the right and add this as “meta data”. We’ll add more meta data later on.
- Once you’re ready, start adding in other pages that you might have missed: your utility pages, contact pages, about us pages etc. Add them all in to this site structure
The Goal For Your Pages
- the next step is often forgotten: add another column and determine a goal, for each and everyone of these pages.
- If you have determined those goals for each page, you know which functionality you’ll need. Start mapping those functionality needs to pages.
- you’ll figure out two things in one go: the functionality you will need for your site, and how many different page templates you’ll need. How you’ll know that? Well, simple: a page template is nothing more than a combination of all the types of content and functionality on a page, so by going through the list you should be able to determine how many different types you’ve got.
Taxonomy and post type needs
- With WordPress 3.0, we can now determine what kind of content our post or page really needs and create those different post types. Justin Tadlock has a great post on the topic showing off what you can do with those custom post types.
- With the need for custom post types, you might also need custom taxonomies.The possibilities are endless, and it’s pretty easy to create those custom taxonomies using my Simple Taxonomies plugin.
- Go through your Excel for your site structure again, and add in your newly thought of taxonomy pages. Now you have the basics for your site ready