As I mentioned in a previous post, there are three sources of web traffic/readership: direct, referred and search. In order to get the most mileage out of your editorial budget, you should consider all three of these when assigning/editing/repurposing content.

Ideally, you’ll want your content to be attractive to all three types of reader. For instance, if you’re assigning a story that will be a web throw from in-book, make sure to consider a) how best to optimize it for search and b) how to make it attractive for other sites – including social bookmarking sites – to link to. The same goes in other directions, too: if you’re creating a metapage (more on those later) aimed at search, think about how you can make it linkable and promote it to direct traffic, whether in-book or as a feature on your home page.