You need information architecture on your site as well; in your content, through your links, and in the way that you set up the traffic flow. Information architecture is what makes visitor stay on your site once they arrive. You have to optimize it for the user, making it easy for them to find and utilize the information on your site! If the user arrives on your site to be faced with a beautifully laid out town with no map, he or she is going to become quickly disillusioned.
Usability and findability are key to information servers like most websites; even strictly sales sites have to provide information and this is what the visitor is generally looking for. Providing a site that is solely put together for search engines will lose you customers every time. With the right attitude, you can provide a great user experience without sacrificing any search engine worthiness; just remember that your site architecture and your information architecture have to walk hand in hand.
SEOs need to pay attention to both. We can’t ignore the need for user friendliness. Ours is no longer a simply technical job – use tool A with component B so it will do C; we have to make the handle on tool A fit the hand of user D, so the action of C is enjoyable and results in user satisfaction.
Tags: information, site architecture, usability