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.

Not long after the insentient I started getting phone calls from concerned potential clients about rip off reports being filled against by company. The customers had names I’d never heard off and there was no way for me to contact anyone to find out what was going on. Rip off Reports, refuses to remove any information once it is posted on their site, unless you want to pay some money under the table. That’s how they support their business.

I wasn’t about to pay money to have a list of complaints from fake customers with fake names that I knew nothing about removed. I decided to go about running my business and ignore them. However their tactics are a bit sneaky, they target the company’s name, something that is easy to rank for and get’s the company’s attention pretty fast.

I’ve since done my best to ignore them, however, I was once again attacked by the competition over a misunderstanding about a site that I did not own nor had anything to do with. The company in question thought I was attacking their name and decided to return the favor by attacking mine.

We got the whole thing sorted out but I decided it was time to put an end to all these attacks. My next couple post on this blog is going to be talking about the steps I’m taking to protect my name and to keep the competition away from it.

It appears that everyone has moved into the blogging arena and the forums are left with a lot of the “why has my site lost it's ranking” post. And the number of blogs make it impossible to even begin to find all the different views on the subjects at hand.

I decided to find the best marketing blogs online and pull their RSS feeds back to my forum to make it easier for me to keep up with the latest changes. As members, we are able to find and respond to the post that we feel are worth someone else's time.  

Like this morning funbiz pointed out a post that I knew nothing about http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/forum/viewtopic.13717.html

If you have a blog about social media sites, search engines, or marketing and feel that the community could benefit from what you have to say, send me your <a xhref="http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/forum">forum user name</a> and blog RSS feed and I'll set the forum up to pull the post from your blog and put a short description along with a link to your blog on the forum.

Thanks for your time.

Janeth

A black hat is the villain or bad guy in an old western movie. He is the character wearing a black hat in contrast to the hero’s white hat. The phrase is often used figuratively, especially in SEO slang, where it refers to a technique that breaks search engine rules. Google says that white hat SEO is someone that would write copy, give advice on site architecture and help in finding relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. Anything else would be black hat.

While copy is very important, without links going to that copy, no one will ever find it or read it. And no matter how good the site architecture is, without some outside influences it want make any difference. And I am all for submitting sites to directories but the truth of the matter is, they have very little affect on getting a site to rank.

Here’s my two cents on white hat and black hat.
White Hat SEO

A white hat SEO charges you money and gives you very little in return. At best you get a website where they have optimized your copy and then submitted to the online directories as well as set up a good internal linking structure. All of this is important but it is not going to over flow your pockets with cash.
Black Hat SEO

Depending on how black they get, it can get very dark. They can build you a list of 50,000 keywords, put a bot together that grabs text from different sites, mixes it up, making it unique and then builds a page for each of those keywords, optimized for the search engines, over night. They have blogs and other cloaked sites as well as a site set up on every free hosting site online in place for linking to these sites. They can have you tons of good traffic coming to your site over night. You can be making money in a week’s time, if you have a good site that will convert the traffic. However, you stand a chance of your site getting band from the search engines a week later. All the traffic stops and no one wants to touch you.
My Thoughts on SEO

I build my sites for the site visitors and market them for the traffic. It’s Google’s job to make their search engines work, not mine. I’ve got no desire to build sites and cloak pages, not because it is wrong or want work but because I do NOT want to get a site banned. However, I agree with building a list of keywords and creating a page for each of those keywords with unique content one each page. I also agree with setting up an internal link structure that will let you pass the highest amount of pr to your best pages with your keywords for those pages being used as anchor text.

A site with 10,000 or more pages can even allow you to rotate your keywords for the internal pages.

But it’s all a waste of time if your site does not convert the traffic.

There are the ones that call themselves experts because they’ve read every single patent, email, article and have hung out at or spoken at SEO conferences. These people have studied the search engine papers and understand how they feel the search engines should work. They have their understanding of what is to come and spend a lot of time on forums and blogs debating how they feel the future will play out.

They are good to have around because they keep the rest of us from having to do what they are doing. However the more I’ve gotten to know these people the more I’ve learned that most of them get their clients from the forums or conferences. They rank their sites for obscured terms and point, yell and jump up and down at their rankings.

Then there is the other group. The doers. They’re not much interested in doing SEO work on your site because they’ve already built their own site that is ranked in the search engines and bringing in affiliate money. They’ve got sites making them $50 to $100.00 per day. No client to deal with, no deadlines to meet, no employees to hire and no phones to answer. They hang out on the forums and blogs but are not seen as the experts. They have their network of sites that they would rather not talk about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6hz_s2XIAU

1. Customer service has to be at the front. There is nothing I’ll ever do with my business that will be more important than customer service.

2. Never ever stop. There are times when I want to through my hands up and walk away; those are the times I need to work my hardest.

3. Never lose my cool. No matter what the problem always remember that no one is getting out alive. It’s all just a game.

4. Simple is always better.

5. Plan, strategize, and organize before making any moves.

6. Answer every email in person; never try to automate an opportunity to communicate.

7. Never try to sell anything, just be a friend.

8. Target a market and go after it, do not try and conquer the whole internet.

9. Always remember that internet marketing is nothing more than common sense and persistence will always win.

10. Never play for the money; it’s all about the business.

11. Track everything

12. Work at making my website stupid proof.

13. Network more.

14. Start an affiliate program.

15. Write a contract for every job.  

I’ve got a blog about lawn mowers and since I know nothing about lawnmowers I went to some free article sites and got free information and stuck on my blog. Those articles rank on the major search engines and bring in traffic. I created another site about silicone wristbands and again used free articles for the information. Those articles are starting to rank and bring traffic into that site.

Duplicating an entire site when you are also duplicating the code would be a problem. However if you are posting an article onto an existing site then your code and links are different and the site is not duplicated. Not only will that post rank but if you put enough links to it will out rank the original article. I’ve seen it happen and I’ve also seen one article rank right behind another.

This means that when you write an article there is no reason to write one for your site and another to submit to the search engines. You only need to make sure your site has more incoming links going to the article.

I figured anything lost in a keyword rich domain name would be made up in the age of the name. I took a list of about 1,500 keywords as a base to start with and sprinkled them out between 2 sub domain names and the main site. Now the site is still being set up so it has a long ways to go. I have to set up and write original text for 1,500 pages.

But I had a friend and SEO expert tell me that if I changed the topic of the website it would go into a filter and take months to rank.

The old back links want help for ranking on the anchor text but they should still pass pr onto the site and help ranking for the current text and information being put on the site. They should also help with internal linking.

The site is here rubber wristbands and the content and pages are being added now. The spiders want be able to spider the left menu. It has some pretty neat mouse over affects but got broken when I was adding pages and needs to be fixed.

At the bottom of the page or near the bottom are five links. These five links link from page to page throughout the site and throughout the sub domains names that are also being added.

I am adding text as well as adding internal links to each page from outside sources. If the sub domain names start ranking and the main site does not then it would indicate some type of filter in place that keeps a site content from changing.

And if this is the case I have to wonder how much of a change would set off the filter. But I'll need at least a month to see if there is such a thing.

If there is I will lose a lot of time on this site. Which brings up a thought about rather or not redirecting the current site to a new domain name would let me bypass the age filter.

Wanting to figure out new and better ways to work around these problems have caused me to try almost everything. None have worked to my satisfaction.

There are things I want to do in life that have nothing to do with running a business. But it seems almost impossible to do any of these things as long as my business is in play.

One thing I've never tried is affiliate marketing. I've never been very big on selling someone else's product and having to rely on their site to make the sale. Another problem with affiliate marketing is that I have to wait a month to get my money. Who wants to wait all month to get paid?

But recently my problems with affiliate marketing seem small compared with the problems of running my own business. I've got a client that sells silicone wristbands and I've decided to give his affiliate marketing a try.

I've got a lot of sites, some of which get decent traffic. Every since I started making my living online I've always herd it's about the traffic. But now I have to wonder. Would a site about lawn mowers convince a site visitor to purchase a silicone wristband?

I don't think so. This means the site has to be in line with my targeted market. For testing purposes I decided to create a blog and see if I can make blog post about silicone wristbands and drive traffic to my blog. But I have to wonder if it wouldn't be better to build a website about silicone wristbands?

Since these silicone wristbands can be customized I could actually create my own silicone wristbands and send them to the page on that site to purchase them. But this would require a lot more time and who knows if I am even able to make the whole affiliate marketing thing work.

In the past I had gotten fairly good at driving traffic from social media sites but this traffic is not going to convert as well as I would like. But I think it would convert. I guess step one is in seeing if I am still able to drive traffic from social media sites to my silicone wristband blog.

But should it be a blog or a website. I think the website would convert better but would take longer to set up. However in the end if it made me more money it would be worth the extra effort.

I guess there is a lot to think about before I can even get started with this new adventure.