When you're putting together your information architecture, you should be considering usability (first and foremost), but you should also be bringing SEO objectives into this portion of the project. Don't let SEO be something you do after the Web site has launched. That's backward.

Develop a set of keywords you know you want to focus on and make sure you're building a Web site that actually has pages devoted to the keywords. Having a ranking for a keyword is not happenstance. You need to have content in order to have any "meat" the search engines can chew on.

Also, don't "pare down" your Web site. Your new Web site should have more pages. You want the search engines to see your Web presence is growing, not shrinking. I've often seen a Web site with 100 pages relaunch with 500 pages do better because of the "tail" traffic (those additional 400 pages are getting direct traffic), and the Web site seems to get a bump in "authority" because the entire Web site has grown. I refer to this as the "Wikipedia" effect (that's a huge Web site, in case you didn't know).

Read the full article:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629217