Building Search Into Your OrganizationBy Andrew HallinanMost corporations understand that a great search strategy relies mostly on incorporating the absolute best practices throughout their organizations. It can become a nightmare as a corporation’s activities start to become separated from each other. Departments often have territorial or political reasons for not talking and communicating interdepartmentally, and sometimes the organization of these departments prohibit excellent communication across multiple branches. The key to great support comes from the top down. If your upper management creates an environment which is central to having search strategies a priority, then it can then be a goal shared by the entire corporation. Upper management absolutely needs to provide the necessary resources for search integration and to make sure that all departments are motivated to create great upward momentum to the search marketing strategy. Here are some tips to great content architecture across your organization. 1. Make sure that your website has the most useful and functional information architecture possible Make sure that multiple pages don’t have similar or thin content. Will your website’s visitors be confused at all? Is the page they access relevant to the information they’re looking for? Don’t ever confuse your visitors, and don’t ever show them something they aren’t looking for. Keep it simple! 2. Make sure that the copy on your website speaks to your customer Keyword research is a huge part of this. You must make absolutely certain that anyone writing web copy has access to (and understands) your keyword research. Make sure they use this research in the writing and development of web copy – if your core demographic is high school children, don’t write using the vocabulary of someone with a PHD. 3. Although your meta keywords tag is not helpful in search engine optimization, it can be helpful in collaboration. Often, a company will spend countless dollars and time on research about how to speak to their customer, how to create the best marketing calls, marketing segments, and then a copywriter will change the message without realizing all of the energy that was put into the message. To help avoid this, make sure the copywriter has coordinated site wide, and make sure they incorporate the correct keywords into the content. Don’t focus too much on keyword density, but rather on providing valuable content. 4. Remember that every page of your site is a possible entry point. Every page of your website is a possible entry point for your customer and should be developed using this mentality. Make sure that each page clearly states the primary subject, provides contextual navigation and momentum about the rest of the website, helps the visitor complete a task/find what they were looking for, and to motivate the visitor into your sales funnel. Pages often don’t have a strong call to action and conversions may suffer greatly. Your corporation should create a checklist for each page to ensure all of these actions get met. 5. Make sure that your website has a great internal linking structure. This is absolutely crucial to make sure that you have an easily crawlable website. At least one internal link should be in place to each page of your website. A page that does not have an internal link to it is called an “orphan page” and will never be seen by the search engines. 6. Think about what you’re going to link to from the home page. Your website’s home page is the page that most visitors will see – so it’s important that you link to your most important pages. Search engines also recognize this, and they use your home page link architecture as a sign of what your most important pages are. Source: www.isnare.com Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=543601&ca=Internet |
