Site Architecture - Link Structure

Structuring a Site's Internal Link Structure. Consider:

Homepage
SiteMap
Internal Links

"The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site - it is the top level document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and so forth. " - quoted from entireweb & Craig Broadbent - see below

Internal Links - "The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together. Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links, meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also typically ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated website. " quoted again from Entireweb & Broadbent

SiteMap - How important?

The site map is the "nexus" by which all of which your pages get into the search engine. Or at least, by which all pages are guaranteed to be only two steps from the front page. Google now has some clever sitemap approach which provides feedback to them about your site architecture and its changes. It supposedly helps improve your rank....


Original article sent by entireweb - written by : Craig Broadbent is Search Engine Optimisation Executive for UK-based internet marketing company, WebEvents Ltd. Clients of WebEvents benefit from a range of services designed to maximise ROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visit http://www.webeventseurope.com/.

Content Distribution

I write alot and would like these articles to be republished broadly.

My best list of sites that take articles and press releases.
And another point, google tracks where articles appear first so before you put them out for syndication, publish them at home

I did two releases thru a consulting company who put them on PR newsnow. They seemed to get some distribution. They can be found at:
Children Going BackToSchool Increasingly Login to Educational ...
Rapidly Growing Homeschool Trend Stimulated by New Internet Tools

Heres a pretty good article on the topic of content distribution.
http://www.prnewsnow.com/Write%20Better%20PR/SEO%20Content%20Distribution%20Linking%20For%20Newbies. It mentions websites that distribute content: isnare.com, amazines.com, and goarticles.com.

I have a number of articles ready for distribution such as:
Internet Safety
Learning to read
Summer Skills Sharpener
Learning Math Skills

And there are others that are near-ready such as:
HomeSchool Curriculum - Many Choices (bottom half of the page)
Learn to Read
Reading Skills
PreReading Skills
Phonics
Reading Comprehension
Building Vocabulary
Reading Fluency

Anybody out there with some real expertise in turning my content into gold via content distribution with embedded links / keyphrases?

Google PPC

Until recently (sept), 100% of my sales were generated by google ppc. Since then, natural search and advertising is generating between a third of my traffic and new members.

However, I spent the previous year glued to my google ppc account. Because my online education curricula is very low cost, I needed to manage my cost per customer acquisition very tightly. But, despite google being my No 1 business partner, they were not that helpful in teaching me how to use and optimize my use of their tools.

I did a monthly analysis by keyword of my spend per new customer (ie avg cost per click x number of clicks = total cost. Total cost / new customers = cost per customer.) For keyphrases that did well, I increased my bid. For those that did poorly, I decreased my spend.

New features seemed to show up faster than I learned them. The ability to put the keyphrase automatically into the title was a cool one that I stumbled across after unthinkable amounts of time on a manual approach to that function.

There are not that many good articles on this topic. Heres one.

http://www.prnewsnow.com/Write%20Better%20PR/How%20to%20Cheat%20Google%20AdWords%20Select

Blog promotion with Ping-o-matic

I have found the neat pingomatic tool. Here are some questions?

- Does anybody know if blogger has a built-in pingomatic? They do have a setting which means that a blog and its updates gets listed in a directory? How does that compare to putting an update in the ping-o-matic?

- Are there other tools that provide a comprehensive (better or different) listing service than Ping-o-matic?

- Has anybody ever named any tool as well as the ping-o-matic? It appeals to the geeks who have pinging at the command line for years as well as the newbies who like the cool-oh name.

- What happens if you put in a non-blog into the ping-o-matic? Does that effectively build links and visibility? Or does ping-o-matic include a screen-o-matic function so that it only works on blogs and other web journaly things?

For instance - can I put in a newly updated page on my website - such as HomeSchool Curriculum or Special Needs Learning and use it as a link-builder?

Wow - thanks for the email... theres one called blogflux - http://pinger.blogflux.com/

Parked Domains - How best to use them?

I have these domains currently parked which means that they are pointing towards domains that have some content.

Can anyone tell me what good they do from a traffic generation or SEO point of view?

Can anyone tell me the best way to use relevent domain names? I see some companies with entire structures of links and ads built around unused domains. Are these structures profitable? Are they accessible to small scale companies like myself?

www.earlyeducationcenter.com
www.help-your-children-learn.com
www.help-your-kids-learn.com
www.kidslearnfaster.com
www.learning-in-the-digital-age.com
www.parenting-in-an-electronic-age.net
www.parentingbible.com
www.time4learning.net
www.time4math.com
www.time4reading.com

http://www.ikeepbookmarks.com/OnlineKidsLearning

Google Page Rank Dance

Sunday, my home page rank was a 6.

Monday day - I was a 5. sigh.

Then Monday evening, a 6 again!!!!

Today, I'm a 5. sigh sigh.

Is this normal?

Interactive Learning - Homeschool Curriculum

Domains - Parked & Useful?

Parking domains.

I have more recently pursued this topic:
Unused Domain - How best to use them Dec 2005
Monetizing Domains - 9/06
Lisa's discussion at Webhosting Talk on using idle domains

I havesome idle domains that I have just registered and parked (ie redirected to other domains where I've put something up). Do they help with page rank and traffic?

I notice that before I redirected them, someone (the registrar?) had installed some algorithmic software that put up alot of pages and ads built around the keyphrases of the domain name. Anybody know where these packages come from? I suspect for the right names and domains, there might be some reasonable income from these set-ups...

Update Note - 8/06 - At the local http://www.techshowflorida.com
www.educational-games.org
www.learningames.com
www.ilearninggames.com

learning-in-the-digital-age.
www.parenting-in-an-electronic-age.com
www.parenting-in-an-electronic-age.net
www.parentingbible.com

www.time4learning.net
www.time4math.com
www.time4reading.com
The Early Education Center dot com
www.help-your-children-learn.com
www.help-your-kids-learn.com
www.kidslearnfaster.com

TimeForLearning
TimeFourLearning

Link Weight

My homepage is now a Google PR 6. Many of my pages are PR 5s (including pages like "Contact us" and "privacy statment" but thats another question). Some are 4s. Some are unranked.

Question: Whats the relative benefit for me to getting more links from 0's? 1's or 2's? 3s or 4s? 5s? 6s? 7s? I think the algorithm probably depends a bit on the base that you are starting from and your current rank. For me, I have several hundred relevent links in including a about a dozen 5s and 6s.

Heres my theory. For me, assuming relevency:

a link from a PR7 is worth 5x a PR6
PR6 is worth 5x PR5
PR4 is worth 5x PR4
PR3 is worth 5x PR2
PR2 is worth 5X PR1
PR1 is worth 5X PR0

I would be pleased to hear other theories, particularly if they are based on more solid analysis than my own......

My site: interactive homeschool curriculum

Site Relevance

Relevancy - Everyone says that relevent links matter more. I've also heard that google likes clusters of pages that are "relevant".

How does google figure relevancy? For instance, I run an education site focused on Prek-8th grade. What does google consider relevant?

- Other education sites - do they distinguish between grade levels or elementary, middle, high, post secondary, graduate, or professional training?

- Are children a sector? Will chidlren's shopping sites be considered relevent?- Software. Is educational software relevent to games? Is web technology and marketing issues relevent to educational software? Would this link - www.time4Learning.com - count less because its in a technology / software / marketing paragraph than the link in the paragraph below?

- Subject matter - Time4Learning focuses on teaching kids language arts and math with social studies and science thrown in. We are a modern version of Hooked On Phonics minus the bogus claims and high price. We compete in terms of functionality with Kumon, Sylvan, Huntington, and the other educational systems but Time4Learning has the convenience of being home-based and is very low cost. www.Time4Learning.com remains a great deal but unfortunately, a best-kept secret. Other quality online learning programs such as SuccessMaker, Headsprout, CleverIsland, and (tbc?) cost alot more.

Todays lunch - More content, more genuine links, no more gimmicks

I spent an hour today with a sharp local SEO guy who preached staying on the straight and narrow. His belief is that google et al are getting real sharp, starting with jagger, in finding sites whose link count comes from related sites. He also believes that these inter-related links will not just be not counted, but will hurt the site. Google will find "spoke & wheel sites" both by architecture and common ownership and will drop their sites. Very interesting. I had thought that you could not hurt your main site if you pointed to it alot since otherwise we could all nuke our competition. He pointed out that google probably has priviledged access to the whois database. My structure with www.todays-learners.com being primarily focused on ecommerce and supporting Time4Learning, he thought was probably safe but not necessarily. My take-away....
Search engines fight for legitimate content and dismissal of tricks is about to accelerate. Watch out anyone near the line.
More good content without repetition or stuffing and reasonably focused on keywords, is a great investment.
Within a period indeterminate (1 year?), google will start using stickiness to prioritize sites.
Becoming an "authority" site is great and comes thru links and content.
There are no real insights into how google tracks relevance

Cyber Monday - An index to gauge success

Time4Learning had its best day in history on cyber monday (monday after thanksgiving when the media reports that online shopping was HIGH). Is there anyplace out there that I could use a index to see if proportionately, I had a better day than anybody else? It would be great if they had an index by sector, say online elementary education or educational game sites? But still, any index which will tell me how I did proportionately to others would be useful. I did about 4x my usual business. Was that good?

What links matter?

How can you tell the weight of pages or of links that help you? Other than trying to figure out all the variables (importance of page, relevance of page, number of links on that page, body text vs advertisement, reciprocal links etc etc), is there a short-cut to finding out which links the search engines treat as the most important? Here is an analysis of the first dozen links reported in the search engine. Link count: google 70, Yahoo 651. MSN 6489.

BTW - I use marketleap.com as a metaway to count links to my site. I did just run across the most amazing set of tools at: http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/

Google - There is the page rank system. Does the order in which sites come up when you google the sitename suggest which links are weighing most heavily? What if I use the mysterious google search on: link:http://www.Time4Learning.com, do the results of that search indicate which links are helping me the most? By the way, google list me as having a 6 page rank on my home page, 5 or 4 on most other pages. They report 70 links to my site and while their list of 70 has changed a few times in the past six months, the 70 number has not. Go figure.

MSN - Reports that I have 6,489 links. It seems to report some of the newest ones first but then, also some of the ones that correspond to google's PR system rank high.

Yahoo - 651 links is what they report for http://www.time4Learning.com.

Lets compare the first dozen links reported in each search engine's report on links to see what we can find.....

reporting engine results for G M Y - Looking at order....

developerdispatch.com 1stY 4thMSN - a new single link on a 6PR site...
time4learning.com 1st-3rdG 16th-17thG 2ndY 2ndMSN 11thMSN - these are internal links
KlamathDesign 3rdY 5thMSN 13thMSN - multiple links, a weblog on a .com domain, some PR ~3 ?
carolhurst.com 4thY 8thY 6-7thMSN - multiple links, PR of 6
feedingbroward.org 7thG 5thY 3rdMSN - multiple links, PR5
lifelearningmagazine.com 6thY 9thMSN 17thMSN
teachers.net 7thY
todays-learners.com 8th-9thG 9thY - many many links
inspirebrilliance.com 10thY
greatschools.net 4thG
www.learning-fun.blogspot.com/2005/07/new-school-year.html 5thG , 12-13thG 12thMSN - many many links
children-online.org/Frames/resources.html 6thG
familyhomeschoolingonline.com 10thG
autodidacts.com 11thG
profiles.yahoo.com/johnedelson 14thG
greatschools.net 15thG
fastcharge.com 1stMSN
homeschoolmath.blogspot.com 8thMSN
reading-skills-pyramid.org 10thMSN
homeschool.lindajomartin.com 14thMSN
homeschoolmath.net 15thMSN
nfahm.blogspot.com 16thMSN (andrea hermitt)
homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/methods/DLPsCyberschools.htm 17thMSN

Does the order of these list signify anything?
Does the fact that the Press releases don't show up signify anything?
Does the fact that some newer links show up early signify anything?
Does the fact that the blogs are listed up high signify anything?

Google links
Yahoo Search Results - 11/20/2005
MSN links - 11/20/2005

Link Tracking Tools, SEO page analysis tools - free

link counters:
http://www.helpfulinformation.org/seo-tools/anchortext.pl - cool original analysis - based on what?
www.marketleap.com - counts links from major search engines. maintains a history so you can track trends.

SEO / rank counter...
http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php - interesting tool for finding rank.

http://www.ranks.nl/cgi-bin/ranksnl/spider/spider.cgi?lang=en - keyword density tool

Other ideas?

Help Wanted

Its time to admit it, I need help. Anybody out there want to be an ongoing contractor / consultant to www.time4learning.com ? Problem is that I can't pay the high rates ($50-$100) an hour, I need some people to work to help with: blogs, forums, graphics, writing on education, etc etc. Below is one write-up of projects. Respond to recruiting at time4learning.com.


I'm looking at putting together some combination of blogs, discussion groups, or forums. They would have two goals. One would be for Time4Learning parents to discuss the system amongst themselves according to their interests (special needs, Preschool-1st, middleschool etc).

The other goal would be to create discussion groups that I could sponsor that would create visibility and links for time4learning. My current idea is one called: "Special needs learning and computers" Discussion GroupsI would like the discussion groups to be accessible from the member login page. Maybe have the most recent topics portrayed there thru some sort of RSS. Other than that, I would like it to be moderated.

Should I initially start with no topics or subforums and see what discussions develop?

Or should I start with a few separate forums:- Special Needs Learning- PreK-1st- 2-3rd- 4-5th- Middle School- Homeschool IssuesWhat technology to use? Yahoo discussion groups seems like the simplest dumbest solution.

Blog for marketing1. Idea A - Set up a blog properly designed to send links and traffic to Time4Learning. I've actually already set a few of these up but I tend to dump materials there (from submitted articles, my newsletters, and website) without much method and I build links to it haphazardly. Theres no plan to build traffic, no upgrading of the base graphics, no adwords, and no way of measuring how its doing other than page rank. Right now, it is a 3 which i guess is OK.its http://learning-fun.blogspot.com/.

2. Idea B - set up a blogger site (or set of them) and invite people to come blog there. I have 700 parents who can be "given" a free blog as part of their Time4Learning membership. I also have a mailing list of 10K plus. One general topic for blogs that I would like to see get explored is Special needs learning and computers"

There is a third and fourth, perhaps related idea, that I would like to implement.A list (blog perhaps) of recently asked questions or comments by parents. Also on the Members Login page.A weekly word puzzle that we post to Time4Learning and perhaps let others put on their site as a game and a way of building page rank. Questions- What experience do you have on these projects?- How feasable / expensive would they be?- At the end, I need something thats easy to manage and which can evolve. I'd like to have one of my mom's become the forum leader.

reading, writing, math, spelling & SEO

I have about 30 pages on my site created entirely for SEO purposes.

Fifteen of them are built around the math curriculum. They start with Preschool math and are crammed with words like preschool math lesson plans, printable worksheets, and curriculum. They continue up to eighth grade math which is full of ....yes....eighth grade math lesson plans, printable worksheets, and curriculum. While these do not read or flow as well as I would like, they have been effective at drawing traffic.

Fifteen more of them are built around a carefully constructed set of keyphrases chosen thru a tight methodology which picked the best keyphrases balancing where my site is competitive enough to get on the first page and the volum is high enough to merit the effort. These have been so far a bust (although other parts of the methodology such as building the page template have contributed to the math pages success).

Next in line, a chunk of pages by grade on spelling and reading.

I keep track of it all on my reading, writing, math, spelling page