Website Design

I’m about to launch another silicone wristband site and thought I’d show a friend the steps I’m taking with the launch of the site.

The site architecture structure is one of the things I’m really depending on to boost the rankings and put the site in the top ten for my keywords. I’ll use the site architecture to focus on my most important keywords as well as control the flow of link juice and insure the ability for the search engines crawl.

Let Me Explain a Little More.

I’ve started by evaluating the top 20 sites that are currently ranking for my main keywords. I’ve studied their navigation to find out their primary topic scheme as well as look for any secondary navigation schemes. And I’ve looked to see if any of the competition is going after the same secondary and primary topic schemes.

I’ve made a list of their title tags as well as their primary and secondary topic schemes. I’m learning more and more about were their bread and butters at.
I’ll run the heaviest traffic areas through my main navigation. This will allow me to run a navigation structure that will point the most juice from my site to the most important pages. This is my core navigation.

Secondary Navigation

I want to keep all the pages no more than three clicks form the home page. This will insure that all pages are crawled regularly. It will also help me to achieve both clarity and focus throughout the site.

While this is an important part of the site navigation, the real power is in the ability for me to focus on my main money pages while using the less important pages to boost those pages to the top of the search results. Each time someone clicks on the main navigation the secondary navigation down the left side changes. The secondary navigation focuses on the keywords related to the main navigation.

One of the things that I’m currently concerned about is the fact that visitors normally become confused when presented with more than five choices in the site navigation. For this reason I’ve separated the sections into categories and placed headers above each category.

I’ve also done my best to place keywords in the links as well as the headers. This is good for both my site visitors, as it brings clarity to the site, and for the search engines, as it gives them something to feed on. As the site grows the secondary navigation grows allowing the main site and main navigation to stay the same.

Main Navigation

Depending on what the money topics are I can move the topics around in the navigation keeping the main money topics closer to the top. Feeding the spiders as well as giving the site visitors what they are most likely looking for, first.

CSS

Because Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) gives me better control of styles like spacing, color, font, etc. we designed the whole site in CSS. CSS gives me more flexibility and control of the exact page appearance; from precise positioning of the layout to specific fonts and styles.
CSS is a cleaner code and makes the site easier to update as well as giving the site a faster load time. CSS requires less code compared to table designs. This makes the code lighter and cleaner.

CSS and SEO

CSS automatically makes the site SEO friendly. HTML code can reduce the accuracy of the results while CSS is much cleaner and the search engines have a much easier time working its way through it.

The cleaner code will result in better search engine rankings.
I’m also able to control what the search engines see first. Making the main content of my site show up above the header and navigation menu in the site; showing the search engine crawlers the importance of my content.

I’ve seen many website get a boost in rankings after going from an HTML website to a full CSS web site. I’ve also noticed a lot of tools in the past couple years that show code over text ratio of your site. The reason for this is because Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. For this reason we went with a full CSS site.

Website Accessibility

CSS also makes the site more accessible. We are currently working on an additional CSS document designed for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; this is not achievable with a table layout.

Increase Download Time

CSS code downloads faster than tables giving us a much faster download time then we would have if we had gone with a table design.

Bleeding

A page want lose page rank because you link out, but linking out does affect the level of page rank available to pass to other pages. For this reason we have used the No Follow tag throughout the site to control the amount of page rank being passed from one page to the next.

An easier to rank page does not need as much juice as a hard to rank page. The No Follow tag allows us to pass just enough juice to a page to get it to rank and then flow the rest of that juice to a page that would be harder to rank.

Cross Referenced Navigational Structure

We are currently working on the content of the site. We are planning for over 20,000 pages of content and will use those pages to rank for different keywords as well as to reference back to the main pages of the site.

A link from a page that is on topic with the page it is being linked to and is surrounded by content that is also on topic will get a boost. For this reason we are using the content of the site to help boost the rankings for our main keywords.

There are lots of other things currently going on with the site but this should give you a good idea of the direction we are heading.