Strategic Versatility

The beauty of Internet marketing is that you can adjust strategy based on performance. If you're attracting a good amount of traffic for certain phrases, you can easily look at how that traffic is behaving and adjust your strategy accordingly. The number of page views and conversion rates are key points to watch. If paid search converts higher and organic yields more page views, you may want to create magnet pages to optimize these results.

The pillars of successful search performance to optimize based on performance are:

• Information Architecture optimization
  • Content optimization
  • Popularity optimization
  • Paid search and display advertising budgets

Information Architecture Optimization

The way your Web site gets indexed by the search engine spiders can be guided by your linking and navigational structure. Keeping navigational information as plain text is key, as search engines don't index images of words. There needs to be a clean path from your home page to any page you want indexed by the search engines. Using bread crumb trails as secondary navigation is a good idea because page names are used as anchor text and they always lead back to the main page.

Information architecture informs content strategy, which relates directly to popularity. Remember the high school analogy? How interesting and cool you are is what makes you popular over time. We'll discuss content and popularity in part four of this blog series.