Top 3 Tactics to Improve Natural Search Now
By Brian S. Klais, Executive Vice President, Netconcepts

Brian S. Klais, executive vice president at Netconcepts, says to follow these three steps for improving sales through organic search: Simplify your landing page URLs; strengthen your landing page titles; and enhance your site navigation links.

Step 1: Simplify Your Landing Page URLs with Keywords: URLs are the "essential signal for qualified rankings and click-through," and that longer ones suppress click-through rates. Given that, you should reduce the directory structure, session ID, and any extra pathways. Use two directory levels or less, and employ two to four relevant keywords and permanently redirect the original URL to the optimized ones.

For example, changing the URL for decorative pillows from Pottery Barn from something like: www.potterybarn.com/shop/prw/prwphv/index.cfm?5ftype=gnav to www.potterybarn.com/decorative-pillows.shtml is what you need to do.

Step 2: Strengthen Your Landing Page Titles: Relevant landing page titles also get more clicks, so add descriptive, relevant, searched phrases to page titles. Try reversing your "bread-crumb navigation" into your title tags by aiming for "product >category>brand" approach.

Step 3: Enhance Your Site Navigation Links: The final strategy is to convert graphic or Javascript links into HTML text links using relevant, explicit phrases in your navigation's anchor text. This can significantly boost your long-tail search results.

---Source: ECommerce-Guide.com 2008. Brian S. Klais is executive vice president of Netconcepts (www.netconcepts.com).