The sort of technology you use and the way you use it has a direct impact on four of the six digital marketplace elements – search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, web development, and social media. If you’ve looked up the chart from the original article, these are labeled as SEO, PPC, Dev and Social in the chart under the heading, Technology.

One of the first things we do at PPI when we acquire a client, or a new web site, or a new landing page, is run some standard measurement tests on it. Oddly, it seems like almost no one else ever does this or if they do, they don’t understand the implications of things like HTML to text ratio, or proper canonicalization, or something as basic as load time. To put it simply, your digital property needs to be well-built. It needs to load quickly, without errors. It needs to deliver the proper layout and content for the device being used to view it. Web server settings need to be optimized to prevent duplicate content. Style sheets need to be organized and served intelligently from one location. Scripts needs to be organized, nested properly, and included in one section of the page whenever possible. You need to use closing tags, for Pete’s sake. Don’t deliver Flash objects to iPad users. All images need to load the first time. Limit how many objects you have delivered from servers other than your own. You know, it’s all those technical things in the site audit that everyone thinks someone else is in charge of fixing. Even if you think it’s something silly, if it’s showing up on an audit report, it needs attention.