Stoney will be speaking about Website Architecture at Searchfest which will take place on March 10th, 2008 at the Portland Zoo. Purchase your Searchfest 08 tickets now.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I was never an exceptional employee for any company I worked for and grew tired of any job after about a year. Working on someone else’s schedule never really worked for me so I always kinda knew that I was going to have to work for myself. If only I had known that working for yourself is much harder than working for any employer.
I dabbled in a few things and my love for computers and screwing around on the Internet led me into search marketing, which brings me to where I am today. I currently operate a successful web marketing company, managing seven employees and growing. Pole Position Marketing has been around since about 1998 and has been built on the team model. We don’t do assembly line SEO but have experts in particular areas that oversea each part of a marketing campaign. The team effort assures that our clients get the best possible results. It also gives them access to the people responsible. If a client has a question about the SEO, they talk to the SEO. If they have a question about the copy, they talk to the copywriter. For links, they talk to the link marketer.
We’ve established a fantastic system of communication with our clients and because of that we have very happy clients, many of which have been with us for three to five years or more. You can check us out at www.polepotisitionmarketing.com and our blog at www.emarketingperformance.com.
2) Can you describe how optimal site architecture can lead to a higher website conversion percentage?
Website architecture is really about making your website search engine friendly. Before you even get to the aspect of optimizing the site for top rankings, you have to make sure that your site is constructed in a way that allows the search engine spiders to find, evaluate and score each of your web pages in a way that best favors the website.
Good architecture does employ some aspects of SEO (i.e. keyword targeting) but it’s really more about accessibility. The more accessible your pages are, and the more you are able to direct how the search engines score each page (i.e. how the pages pass link juice) , then you are in better control to get your important pages in the search engine index and ranked higher in the results. That, in turn, leads to better conversions.
Quick example: lLet’s say you improperly link to your product pages, but you’ve got strong links to your policy pages. Well, your policy pages have potential to rank better than your products, but that page doesn’t sell anything. One aspect of good architecture refocuses the link structure so your product pages get the good links and your policy page gets devalued. Now you have the opportunity to convert your visitors as they are more likely to enter your site via a page that is relevant for their search.
3) How can one best make sure that no search engine “spider traps” exist on a website?
Well, I don’t know if you can be 100% sure 100% of the time that there are no spider traps happening. But it’s important to look at your URL structure, run frequent broken link checks and also to see how well your site can be crawled by the spiders. Overall, if you employ a solid architectural structure you’ll be in a much better position for good rankings than if you hadn’t.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
