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.

Last year I got in a fight with a web Design Company over my pricing, the other web design company felt they were in charge of how much I should be charging and I felt as the owner of my business I was in charge. As sparks flew in the end it appeared I’d won, however that was not the case.

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.

I've slowly been getting back into forum posting over the last couple months. However I've found it difficult to find interesting or even the latest information on the marketing side of the Internet.

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

Black & White Hat SEO and Why They Both Suck

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.

I’ve spent a couple minutes today playing around on some forums and I’ve found that there are two types of SEO’s.

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.