How hard are your keywords working?
The Google spiders are looking for your keywords. Can the arachnids figure out whether your pages really describe those topics, and, if so, how relevant your pages really are?
Seth Maislin, of Focus Information Services in Massachusetts, recently delivered a phone seminar to the Society for Technical Communication, showing how to invent keywords for search engines, use those same keywords as part of your interface (as labels, and as part of your running text), and show the results of a search.
He gave some good tips on ways to come up with potential keywords.
- Start with whatever is easiest (commonly accepted terms, proper nouns, actions, actors, objects, environments)
- Brainstorm synonyms (other accepted terms, local versions, international versions, grammatical variations, misspellings)
- Acknowledge useful categorizations (parent classifications, adjectives, adverbs)
- Consider the user's vocabulary (misunderstandings, incorrect terms, associated concepts, child classifications).
Maislin pointed out that keywords function behind the scenes to help a search engine find the content, but once the engine has found a bunch of results, keywords can be reused as helpful labels for groups of hits. He argues that we should structure our results in a relevant hierarchy, using these labels.
What kind of hierarchy works best for displaying the results of a search?
An interface that looks like a back-of-the-book index, Maislin argues.
Why? Because context helps to define what the labels mean, clarifying distinctions through easy comparison to nearby terms. When we browse a hierarchy, we do not simply read down from the top to the bottom; we range forward and back, up or down, and we get a sense of the scope and orientation of the indexer. When keywords become labels on a results page, they can help indicate context.
So Maislin strongly urges us to categorize results. Examples he cites:
- Yahoo distinguishes results offered by paid sponsors from results drawn from the search itself.
- O'Reilly distinguishes between news articles, weblogs, books, and conference talks.
- WebMD typecasts its content as health topics, symptoms, medical tests, medications, wellness, and support organizations.
- CitySearch organizes results in two ways: alphabetically, and by categories such as restaurants and bars, hotels, movies, spa and beauty, events and Yellow Pages.
Maislin is a fun, serious, and intriguing information architect, who goes by the moniker, "taxonomist." If you are considering building a set of keywords for your content, he is one of the first people you should bring in, as a consultant.
Maislin's site: http://taxonomist.tripod.com
5:15:37 PM 
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