The Information Technology field has to have one of the highest rates of evolution of any field. A friendly warning for College Students, if you don’t like learning and discovering choose another field. Over the last 10 years the evolution of the web has been constant. Today we have information flowing to multiple channels, more complex information being captured, and more data being provided to users. With all of the content and information available it is no surprise that finding that content has had to get more complex as well. Optimizing your web site or web application for search engines is getting more and more complex. One aspect to look at is a subtle one. Ensuring that your site map and your keywords are captured, architected, and developed to work together.

A good BA is worth their weight in gold and early on in the requirements and discovery process capturing the keywords can really help the development of your tool. Keywords are a known importance to optimizing your site for organic discovery by Google, Bing and other search engines. There are tools dedicated to keyword mapping to show how your site will be captured by a search engine. What the keywords can’t be, however, are an afterthought to the development process. Keywords are concise definitions of your web site. Like the advertisement on television for a popular clothing retailer right now, the tag line is “Modern. Southern. Style.”. In three short concise words they define themselves. Even the government has taken to this “Safer. Healthier. People”. Keywords have been around for a while and we all know about them but I bring this up to discuss how we focus on them and use them.

A BA can use keywords to focus requirement sessions, the architect on the site map and architecture for the system, designers to ensure the colors layout user experience match the keywords, developers for for the folder structure, and testers to make sure they got it right. Now some would say that keywords should be derived from the requirements and the experience the company wants for its customers. Which is a great point that opens a question, are the creative people that can help write that copy and help getting involved early enough? Once the keywords have been defined so much can be based on them. The point of this column is architecture so lets jump there.

When the site map is being determined and the layout of the site designed/architected keeping the keywords in mind can really help. It is a common best practice to have a site-map on your web site. Many web sites have several versions to ensure they are read by the search engines. Ever added an XML web site document to ensure Google would read it? So using your keywords in various other locations can greatly assist your website.

If your keywords define your site and its content then shouldn’t your page titles include these keywords? With our keywords in the title another step is to ensure that we use the keywords in the URL. For example, instead of www.sitex.com/en/ we could include keywords www.sitex.com/keyword-keyword/. Not only is this more descriptive for the user the search engines will jump up the importance score. Why does this need to be part of the site map? If you are going to include keywords as part of the URL and folder structure the developers need this info to focus on. So that means knowing the site map before the pages are developed so they can use this information to their greatest value.

Considering the search engine will use the links on the site map to crawl the site, using keywords would help raise the score wouldn’t it? Getting into Canonical URL is a little beyond the scope of what we are discussing here but is a topic you might want to look up as well. While it may seem simplistic at this point in time of the internet’s evolution, keywords are still and will remain and important part of content discovery. Understanding how to re-engage on the importance of keywords and their use can help prepare for future evolution of the web.

Ever hear of the concept of ‘the semantic web’? Today a user views pages for information gathering and capture for activities like travel. With the sematic web, pages will interact in a more automated fashion reducing the amount of work a user does. As the web continues to evolve the potential for keywords to grow in importance is still relevant even considering their long history. The tie in to the site map becomes more important as desired functionality evolves. The key to scalability will be planning today for what is coming tomorrow. Preparing for tomorrow begins with looking at the process, collaborating, and working to the future. Don’t pass over the simple things, they just might be the key to the future.