Site Structure

How should you structure your site?

Before drafting content consider what keywords are your most important and map out how to create pages to fit each important group of keywords within your site theme and navigational structure based on

* market value
* logical breaks in market segmentation
* importance of ranking in building credibility / improving conversion rates

You may want to use an Excel spreadsheet or some other program to help you visualize your site structure.

Make sure

* your most important categories or pages are linked to sitewide
* you link to every page on your site from at least one other page on your site
* you use consistant anchor text in your navigation
* you link to other content pages (and expeically to action items) from within the content area of your website

If you are uncertain how deep to make a portion of the site start by creating a few high quality pages on the topic. Based on market feedback create more pages in the sections that are most valuable to your business.

Market Research

The first step is to search the major search engines to see what types of websites are ranking for words which you deem to be important. For example, if mostly colleges, media, and government institutions are ranking for your most important terms it may be difficult to rank for those types of queries. If, on the other hand, the market is dominated by fairly average websites which are not strongly established brands it may be a market worth pursuing.

You can extend out the research you get from the search results by using the SEO for Firefox extension with the Firefox browser. This places many marketing data points right in the search results, and thus lets you see things like

* site age
* Google Page Rank
* inbound link count
* if any governmental or educational sites link at their site
* if they are listed in major directories
* if bloggers link at their sites