Monday, July 03, 2006

Site Architecture for SEO Purposes

Fact is, I'm such a bigger that there's so many basics which if, I could figure out or if someone would teach me, I'm sure that I could do much better in SEO. My biggest recent breakthrough is that I'm to #11 (from #12 where I sat for a month) on homeschool curriculum. Just a little more tailwind and I might make it onto the front page for google. ....then i move to (sing along)....Easy street.....(anybody seen Annie lately?)

Let's talk site architecture and sitemaps. (note, i'm not even ready to do a nifty google site map)

I have a site map that I set up so visitors could find what they were looking for, so the spiders could find all the pages, and so that I with my faulty memory could remember how I had organized my site. Pretty soon, my site map became too confusing and lengthy for visitors to find anything. I re-organized it and re-organized it. I started leaving off less important (for people) pages and soon, I couldn't remember what pages I had (vs pages I had just thought about making) without firing up the tools. Once I found myself creating a set of pages that when I started to put up, I found that I had written the month before (sad but true). So my new approach is that I have two site map pages...

- a site map that is indexed off most pages including the home page.
- a siteindex which has all of my pages listed.

Now, I think that I've figured out how the pros do it. I'm looking at a page belonging to some big seo-experts (I'm not sure if its secretive that they own it) in which they have both a human and computer oriented map on the same page but the computer one is hidden unless the humans click for more. Take a look on the left side under the label "additional resources"

http://www.socialstudieshelp.com/

Very clever. I wonder if google might somehow someday consider that hidden text and black-hattish.

No comments: