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What a fantastic read! My name is Brian and I have been "lurking" reading and learning on webmaster world for about two weeks. I have messed with website for about three years and finnially got serious and droped the "affiliate website" like we need another one of those and built my "Awesome Chef Recipes".
I am supprised just how closely (I used this term very loosy) I have worked with the above methods outlined. I have tryed to keep my site informative and "different" from the big boy's. My raw skills as a webmaster are shaky at best, my skills in the kitchen are very strong and this is what I have tryed to outline.
I have some questions, anyone who would like to comment on my site is more than welcome. I am just wondering if I should move in anyone direction from here with my site?
I started building my site last summer, just as I started building I broke my foot which keept me at home for about 3 months. I spent this time working out the navagational structure of my site. I tried about 4 site designs until I arived at my present "structure". I have my site broken into catagories and continue to add new pages. Weather they are new recipes, food items (such as my recent herb section) or product reviews aimed at getting new visitors via search engines throught targeted terms (my latest pages are "guy buffet" and "bakeware"). These topics or updates are located on there own pages, this way I get those search engine hits. I get hits from pages like"
shrimp scampi
chicken noodle soup
guy buffet
chef recipes
And so on. After about 2 or 3 months my google rating was a 3. With each new google update I would gain 1 point. Until December when I was rated at a 6. I thought I was really doing well! Just 6 months with close to 300 links from across the web! The last update from google dropped my site to a 5? That is funny, I also got about 100 more inbond links from other websites?
I just made the jump from tripod to my own domain. I used the cheap graphic web counter, it works for me.
When I was on tripod I had a busy "reciprocal links policy" I asked for links from any page that was related to my topic that had a rating close to mine. About a month ago I started reading about these "link farms" and how a "reciprocal links page" could hurt my site? So who do I believe? Again thanks for the great article. I will keep pressing and learning from this great resource on webmaster world.
Chef Brian
(edited by: Brett_Tabke)
Any links to spammish sites I'd delete in your place ("you are who you link to") and maybe categorize the links in some relevant way, maybe dividing them up, adding regular text content. That might even give some traffic for the categories as a resource.
Linking is such a touchy area now, it would be nice to get a few informed opinions on this, since how outbound links are done seems to be a sensitive issue.
If this is the case, my sites' borders hold all my relevant links, brief site description in top left border and other relevent material I want my visitors to see no matter which inside page they are looking at.
Anyone know whether this *ignoring the borders* is common among spiders?
Suggestions please?
