My site layout idea: comments please

[byepolar]

I have a site that revolves around 1 central theme. The home page focues on the main keywords. I have organized my site in a hierarchial (top down/down top structure). I use a path statement (e.g. breadcrumb). I only go 4 levels deep from the root, with the content pages (e.g. articles) appearing on the 4th level, usually. Sometimes the content pages appear on the 3rd level.

I have 4 main top-level categories from the homepage, let's call them A, B, & C. I'm going to use A as an example:
Within A are 15 or so subcategories. Each one of these subcategories targets a keyword phrase. Usually, the keyword phrase is a derivative of one of the main keywords that the homepage targets (e.g. "dogs" and "golden retriever dogs"). Within each subcategory there are further subcategories which are, usually, not targeting keyword phrases in and of themselves, but are re-enforcing the keyword phrase being targeted in the level before it (e.g. "dogs", "golden retriever dogs", "golden retriever dog pictures"). Then, the 4th level are all content pages which don't really target any keyword phrases, but might have them in the text somewhere (so it would re-enforce the cats/subcats before it). I cross link pages within a level (except I don't cross link content pages) (e.g. I cross-link all the subcategories within category A).

The site is informational in nature, and I plan on having thousands of content pages. If I trade reciprocal links, I plan on having a separate links page for each category/subcategory. I want to get ranked for the main keywords, as well as the keyword phrases. I don't just want an all-star homepage getting just the main keywords. I want that, as well as, having my cat/subcat pages come up for specific keyword phrases.

[mbennie]

The structure sounds very much like one of our sites and it works quite well. We get 85% of our traffic from Google/Yahoo/AOL and 90% of that traffic comes in through the interior content pages.

Good Luck.

[netguy]

I agree with mbennie... It appears you have an excellent structure to gain maximum benefit from Google.

Too often I see people trying to 'pack in' their keywords, all in the title, headlines, and content on the home page - when they should use the home page for the primary keyword(s), then have a link menu out to their subpages to handle the many secondary keywords (title/headlines/content, etc).

In my experience on dozens of our sites, a subpage will be indexed by Google as fast and as effective as the home page. Often, if a news story breaks, we can add a subpage with a prominent news title and content, and Google will track the story from the home page, to the subpage, and list the subpage story on page 1 of the SERPs the next morning.

I always try to (fairly) closely match the link title on the home page to the page title of the subpage, though, which I believe adds a little additional validation for Google.

Looks like you'll have a winner.