We all understand the importance of title tags, meta tags, and keyword research, but amongst the 200+ factors affecting your rankings in Google could there be a few that you forget? You know about the importance of high quality inbound links, and relevant content, but what about filenames and file structure?

Grant Crowell of Search Engine Watch wrote an interesting article on optimizing images for search engines.

Most of us keep these sort of things in mind when working on the nitty gritty details of SEO, but what about all of the other small factors that weigh in?

Filenames are very important, but not as important as directory names. Google can crawl deeper than most search engines now, but anything deeper than 3-4 directories from the top might just get lost in the index. Web Pro News posted a really interesting article (that I cannot link to because it requires a login) that discussed the importance of directory names and having a trailing / at the end of any URL. The author mentioned a research that showed the difference of several websites created as a test for search engine rankings. One site had all of the files in the root directory and names the files something like "cat-food.html" while the other site had several directories so the structure looked like "cat-food/index.html". When searched, the results were better for the ladder as the directory name was more important than the site name.

Is this important to the search engines for a reason or just to add to the list of things you and I need to do?

What factors do you consider most important for generating high quality traffic?

Subia Soft has an interesting article on site structure explaining the best layout for pages and internal linking.

While site architecture is important to the techie at heart, inbound links and PR is usually more important to the Social Media heads like most of us here. I assume more than 95% of the members here focus more heavily on creating traffic through the third and final mean currently available; communicating via social networking.

Who would have thought that one day marketing would boil down to the point of simply talking to people in your community and letting them know about your expertise in the market?

Of course, the long tail of search is search in itself because the future is present and with it comes a new demand to be more socially aggressive and active.