How your content is organised and presented online is one of the most important aspects of reference site SEO. Each reference site requires its own rigorous analysis (ideally before the site architecture is developed). Here are a few general points to consider:

• Your publishing platform should ideally be designed around your content taxonomy.
• Taxonomy is influenced by a number of factors, including the content subject, original format of the content, editorial restrictions and the extent to which the content can or cannot be edited for SEO.
• Your content taxonomy (where possible) should be the result of a collaborative effort between an SEO specialist and editorial.
• Where editorial or other concerns restrict taxonomy optimisation, an SEO specialist can mitigate some of the SEO disadvantages by advising on technical configurations for the publishing platform.
• Taxonomy informs on sub-directory and URL structures (among other things) and SEO concerns must weigh up, and in some cases be secondary to, site usability issues.
• Traffic relevance: even if your reference site is receiving healthy search traffic, it may not be the right traffic. We have seen this happen when web design companies have made an effort at SEO but not gotten to grips with the content or technical SEO implementation. In this case pages are ranking for partially applicable search keyphrases resulting in users bouncing from the site, not having found what they were after. (‘Bounces’ are single-page site visits).