July 23, 2008

Beyond Keywording

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What is it that really captures my attention on a website? Sure, I notice look and feel. Every once in a while I come across an interesting UI component or a particularly clever approach that captures my interest. But typically, I’d imagine that like most people, I spend time focused on the website content.

Beyond the immediate subject that drew me to the given site, I’m always looking for what else the site offers and how it presents that information. Even if I’ve deep-linked in to a site or have come to a specific page directly through a search engine, I’ll usually spend one or two other clicks to validate the quality of the information that the site offers. In a typical page view, I’ll read and/or skim the main content, and then look for related links, other stories or tangential topics that may pique my interest. Typically the more relevant or captivating the related links are, the more time I’m likely to spend on the site because I come to trust the site owner and know that I’m in good hands when I click around.

Portal sites can be a great way to allow site owners to present a huge aggregate set of data, but there can be a risk of losing the richer underlying associations between pieces of content. It’s very easy for related links to become just another piece of simple keyword-associated white noise. Even in smaller sites where managing more organic relationships between pieces of content is more feasible, I find that the linked relationships between pieces of content are tenuous at best.

What’s the solution? Depends on a lot of things, but primarily on the purpose of the site and the amount and type of content contained therein. I do know that in my experience, the more I feel like the site owner has put thought and care into my browsing experience, the more I want to read what they have to offer and/or buy what they have to sell. In smaller scale sites, it could be as simple as enabling content creators to manually create associations between pieces of content instead of relying solely on keyword associations. In larger sites with huge amounts of content, there are several approaches:

• Conceptual linking: Leverage a Text Mining Engine to facilitate making content associations at a more meaningful level
• Community engagement: Enable site visitors to collaboratively tag pages to help build or enrich associations between pieces of content
• Behavioral tracking: Present related links in context with a visitor’s browsing pattern, and/or use site overlays and other analytics to harvest browsing patterns and to infer relationships based on visitor behavior

The Semantic Web initiative also holds significant promise to improve how relationships can be captured and inferred between pieces of data, but the technology is still in its infancy. In the meantime, to me, the more organically I can navigate through a site, the more I’ll stick around. If I feel like the site owner has walked in my shoes and clearly expresses their message both in the content and how it relates to the rest of their site, I’m sold. If not, I’m just a click away from trying to find someone else that has.

Posted at 02:03 pm by Craig McEldowney

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