Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site is a "How to.." site. The target audience of the site is not the whole web but the people in my country. The "How to.." articles are written from their point of view.
Google is the search engine 90% of the people in my country use. (According to internet usage articles i have read about my country) So I want to concentrate on making my site only google friendly. (In fact too much SEO tends to make certain sites look intimidating)
My first question is, how should i structure my site? I am not completely clear about what is considered as duplicate content and what is not. So i am afraid about putting the same menu on each and every page.
Besides some of my articles are long. They require an “Index” and the article is broken up onto many pages. If i repeat the index on all the pages will it be considered as duplicate content. If it will, how do i structure really big articles. Can i put all the info on one page. I am afraid that a very huge page will look intimidating to the user, dilute the keywords, and i read somewhere that search engine are not fond of very long pages.
Basically what i am asking is what is the best way to structure my site and articles, given that some of the articles are quite long and comprehensive, search engine and user wise.
I have followed most of the things i read everywhere like H1 tags, title tags etc. Please tell me what else i should consider in site design. At this stage i am starting my site from scratch so i want to make the perfectly structured dream site for users and google.
Thanks a lot!
must_learn_more
If you haven't already read it, start with:
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]
Then move on to Pageoneresults threads on building the "Perfect Page". These will give you some great insight into how to construct pages that will serve you well with the search engines and your readers.
Building the Perfect Page: Part 1 [webmasterworld.com]
Building the Perfect Page: Part II [webmasterworld.com]
Building the Perfect Page: Part III [webmasterworld.com]
Next up would be Tedsters threads on Information Architecture. These will give you an idea of how to buld a very effective site navigation system.
Information Architecture for the Small Site - part 1 [webmasterworld.com]
Information Architecture for the Small Site - part 2 [webmasterworld.com]
While I'm at it I'm going to plug one of my own threads here because it discusses a common short coming among sites, planning for future growth, especially growth the webmaster had not anticipated.
Designing a New Website? Plan for Growth [webmasterworld.com]
People worry far too much about this kind of stuff, it's just not a big deal, never has been.
make it make sense for your users, make the code clean, don't use deprecated html like <font>, use css, keep page html size fairly clean and lean.
Use as much programming as you can for repeated page elements, at least use includes anywhere you repeat page element, once a site grows beyond 100 pages manual updates become a real pain.
give very serious thought NOW to using a quality cms like drupal, it will make your life a lot easier long term, and if you use good search engine mods available the urls will be fine for google.
Don't use .php type extensions, use something neutral like .htm and use apache to process .htm pages as .php, this means you can run the site using whatever technology you want without changing your urls. This is from what I've seen the number one newbie error out there when it comes to seo and making websites.
Even if the site is not now dynamic, plan on it becoming dynamic, if only through using includes for navigation / headers / section indexes and so on.
