Opinions requested about my planned blog setup

Questions regarding SEO and navigation layout.

[JS_Harris]

I'm going to use wordpress as a CMS and I have planned a layout as follows but It's not too late to make changes, I'd appreciate opinions.

Navigation:

- Header contains links to the 3 most important key posts plus the home link.
- Sidebar contains links to 8 key posts + ads + a java gallery.
- A modified "numbered" navigation setup is at the bottom of the page.

So far this will be easy to use, the key posts are the reason search visitors would find the site. The index and numbered navigation pages would keep regulars more than happy.

Special changes:
- The index page contains the snippet of the latest 8 articles, the full article text is there right up to the point I use the "read more" link to entice readers to follow through.
- The numbered pages are modified, when someone visits page 2 for example the page uses a different layout. Visitors only see the excerpt of 12 articles per page with a small image next to it. The excerpt is not the same text as the text found on the index page, it's replaced with the text used as the meta "description" text. Page titles as seen by a browser are modified to reflect the page number.

Questions:

#1 - What should I use as the "read more" text? "read more"? "read more" + "page title"? "page title" only? The article title is already linked in <h> tags beside the author name so the "read more" text is a second link to the same page. Is nofollow on link 2 a good idea?

#2 - How many pages should I include in the numbered navigation? If I set it up as "1 2 3 Last" thats 4 links. 1 ... 17 18 19 20 21 22 ... Last" would be 8 links. How many links is ideal between the first and last page ?

#3 - The site has no category pages and no archive pages. The site being about one topic renders categories useless and the numbered navigation IS the archive, it's on every page. Should I add a second navigation system ?

[edited by: JS_Harris at 3:27 am (utc) on Dec. 4, 2008]

[ergophobe]

Hmmm... I always make the disclaimer that I am NOT an SEO. That said, as a somewhat knowledgeable layman, I would say that I have some fairly serious reservations about your approach.

So by the numbers:

1. I prefer to have it regular followed link and to use a unique text that appears only on that link, so you get some extra variation in your anchor text. I believe this requires a plugin (I think Headspace2 is what lets me do this) but I might be mistaken.

2. Mmm. This doesn't sound very good to me. I know you have your featured posts (the 3 + 8), but that's only three key posts and the eight most recent. I would really try to have any style of navigation other than dated archives or pagination numbers. Forget the keyword and crawl depth issues for a while, these are just no fun for the user. Unless your posts are consistently awesome, who is ever going to page through forever and ever? This just seems bad.

If you're Seth Godin or someone like that who has a following based on work outside his blog and you expect most readers to access your blog via RSS and don't really care if anyone reads your back posts, that's one thing. For us mere mortals though, you need to help the visitor find her way to the sub-topics that interest her and get to your best posts.

3. Nothing bigger than a Twitter post is truly about one topic, and even some Twitter posts cover many topics. My brother has a saying regarding negotiation and problem solving: "Anytime you're faced with a decision between two choices, you haven't thought about the problem long enough."

I think it's like that here. If you only see one topic, you haven't thought about it long enough (I hope that doesn't sound condescending - I do realize that you *have* thought about it a lot and I'm not trying to be dismissive in anyway, just practical). Let's put it this way, my dissertation is on a topic so narrow, most people outside the field are amazed that you could write a whole book on just that, but in fact not only is it divided into chapters, I have it divided into subchapters. It's been a while, so I'd have to go look at the thing, but I'm pretty sure it even has sub-subchapters. Anything can be divided.

Or from another angle, a rule of thumb that I've read for book indexing is any index category that has more than ten page entries is a candidate for dividing into subcategories. The number is fairly arbitrary, could be 20 or 50 or 5 depending on overall index size and the actual term, but I'd say you might think in similar terms here. If you have ten posts, that's probably enough for a category. Unless you have over a thousand posts, 100 is probably too many.

I would seriously reconsider your information architecture. Check out Tedster's classic post on the subject [webmasterworld.com] and some of the other excellent posts on the topic [google.com].

One final thought. If you do change your mind and decide to have category archives, consider getting one of the Wordpress sticky post plugins so that you can create a post that is a category overview. This gives you a chance to put specific content at the top of the page and control the user experience and your keywords a bit more.

One final final thought... You mention putting snippets on the index page. If you take some time to use the optional excerpt feature of WP, you can have these snippets be paraphrases or summaries of the post, rather than excerpts, so that you'll limit even more the amount of duplicate content.

I hope that's helpful.

Oh PPS - definitely have a look at the Headspace2 plugin if you haven't already.

[JS_Harris]

Thanks Ergophobe - I'm Checking out the plugin now, haven't heard of it before.

I do use the optional excerpt with every post, to be clearer the index page shows full posts up the the "read more" cutoff I set but the pages index, ie: page 2, 3, 4 etc, all display the optional excerpt with an image fit in.

The site is heavily image based, people want to see what others are building in their garages, so I have a custom "random image" display in the sidebar that serves up 6 thumbnail images which link to the best of my posts. It's Java based so I left it out of the questions but it does solve the visitor interaction issue without affecting overall SEO. In fact pageviews are near double since installing it.

I'm not done thinking for sure, this isn't the type of site I normally build so your feedback is most welcome.

[JS_Harris]

ergophobe - that is a must have plugin, I love it already and will use it for the more text and tag suggestion features at least.

- It works flawlessly with wordpress 2.7 RC1

- some modules have little use, like the "title" option which is now redundant, but others are genius.

It plays nice with other plugins - the "add meta tags" plugin for example meshes with the tag suggestion feature and converts tags to keywords.

I realise keywords aren't very useful with Google but they seem to be with other search engines still so I need to use them, having them become tags that other services use to categorize posts at the same time is a godsend.

I asked for layout help and got improved SEO and time management on top of it, Thanks again Ergophobe.

[ergophobe]

Ha! Funny, but I took it as an information architecture question more than a design question. I guess because I didn't have a visual on the layout, it was hard to picture.

I don't know if you're a WebmasterWorld subscriber or not, but if you are you could get some feedback on layout and design issues in the Review my site [webmasterworld.com] forum.

Anyway, I'm getting a clearer idea of what this is about.

I still think you want some way to get people to your pages that's less [...searching for the right word...] sequential? I'm not saying this very well. But some ideas to consider would be to get some additional navigation possibilities in the sidebar

- tag cloud (based on user or admin tagging)
- democracy plugin (most popular posts)
- related posts plugin

Just a couple of ideas.

time management

Did I give advice on that? One thing is certain. You know my disclaimer about my SEO knowledge? Well, under no circumstances whatsoever should you ever ever ever take time management advice from me!

Gotta run. I have to get back to tweaking something that was fine five versions ago ;-)

[reprint]

My 2 cents: I prefer to have full posts on the homepage and not "read more". I have tried it both ways and have seen a higher percentage abandon the site using the "read more". I am not sure if it is specific to my site but i suggest you test it rather than decide.
My opinion is that a full post on the page grabs the reader and doesnt put them through another click to get the content. Is there any compelling reasons to make them click through? The other benefit i saw were more people signing up for RSS if i had full posts. I usually have 3 or 4 full posts. Again one person's experience but you might want to test it out for your topic.

[ergophobe]

Interesting perspective reprint. I've gone back and forth, but honestly didn't have good enough tracking on that to measure effects. I did feel like people engaged more with the full posts, but like I say, didn't really measure and this was on such a low-traffic blog I'm not sure I would be able to measure.

BTW, a little off-topic and I don't want to derail this, but it's a point worth remembering. I only went to full posts on the front page because in older versions of WP I was having trouble with the RSS feed. It would only send the part *after* the read more and not the beginning. I was too ignorant at the time to subscribe to my own RSS feed. I learned that lesson - always taste your own cooking before you serve it to guests!

I only discovered the problem when I went to the gym and found a few of my articles, several missing the intro, printed out and put in the magazine rack. That was weird!

Okay, sorry for that diversion. Back to JS's questions...

[reprint]

Good point Ergophobe, always test everything and not just once. I have learned to test regularly especially after software upgrades. Plugin upgrades tend to most prone to triggering problems.

RSS is a whole other game and some markets love it and some dont know what it is. That is something I want to play with. For example changing the position and size of the RSS feed link to encourage more sign-ups.

Thats great that you found your articles in use and even printed out. Possible market for a print magazine? :)