Turn Your Web Site Inside-Out

Seth Godin wrote a great post today on his blog regarding how the search engines have “broken the world into little tiny bits.”

I think it’s a great observation, and it’s not just search engines. It’s social media as a whole! Whether your site got stumbled, you have traffic coming in from your RSS feed subscribers, or your latest article just made the Digg front page, it’s becoming less and less common that all traffic starts at your home page and explores your site from there.

Can you give me a visual? I’m not sure I follow…

Below, is the way a typical site is laid out. Everything starts with the home page, you have your main navigation off that, and finally you get to the pages that contain the specific information visitors are looking for.

Sure, this structure works if you someone types in your domain directly — they start at the home page. But what about the people that found your “eBooks” page through Google? Or the huge surge of traffic from StumbleUpon that went directly to a specific page detailing your newest Gadget? For those visitors, your site layout would look more like the diagram below.

This diagram is illustrating the fact that web sites today are much less hierarchical, and much more “atomized” (as Seth Godin puts it). This, of course, is a simplified version. Large sites that have thousands of pages, would have thousands of blue circles on the outside if the main “navigation” of the site.

What does this mean to me?

More than anything, the simple awareness of this concept can go a long way. Remind yourself and your “web guys” that visitors don’t always start at your home page and follow a step-by-step path through the site.

Is this bad or good?

Like many things, it depends on how you look at it. For myself and my clients, I find this to be a blessing. When designing sites or writing content, the web has evolved to make it easier to find these additions. This “atomization”, when used correctly, can be a blessing. Below I will try to outline some of the different situations this can be used to your advantage.

Search Engine Optimization

Armed with the knowledge that people will find your site in many different ways is good. You can think of every page as a “landing page” and each landing page should have a “keyword focus.”

Here’s an example: Do a search on Google for ‘Google Analytics Tutorials’ (without the quotes) and scroll down to the #7 result (linking back to this blog). If you view the post that is listed under this search term, you can plainly see what the keyword focus is.

If you don’t want to go through the exercise of going to Google and doing the search, you can find the article here.

Social Media

If you’ve tested the waters with Digg.com, you might have made the mistake of Digg’n your root domain, only later realizing that you only get to digg each address once.

By adding valuable content, information, videos, articles, games, animation, images, etc… to separate pages, you have now allowed each page to be dugg by fans. By organizing your content with the inside-out approach, you are making your site much more Social Media Friendly.

Blogs and Blogging

Blogs have this structure natively. Each post is a page and has a topic all on it’s own. By simply using the structure of a blog as your framework, you have already turned your site inside-out.

For more information on how to turn your site inside-out. Feel free to contact us at Chief Ingredient.