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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.7 -
Sculpting Your Site Structure
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
It’s time to patch the holes on your site!
Despite the recent buzz about Site sculpting no longer
working, I have to tell you that I don’t buy that at all, and decide to share
with you what’s site sculpting is all about and how you can implement it on your
site.
Even if the situation was to be proven true, it can’t
hurt you to learn and how more about it!
Why Should You Sculpt Your Site?
PageRank flowing throughout your site is much like electricity. The more
electricity you have at your disposal, and the more convenient it is for you to
use powerful electric appliance that make your everyday life easier.
Now, this doesn’t comes free, there’s a price to pay for
this luxury and that’s your utility bill each and every month. I would say that
I don’t intent to consume less to reduce my bill, but instead prevent to pay for
wasted energy.
Just ask yourself how many electric devices you have in
your house that you don’t use, but yet consume electricity, how many power
switches do you have turned on, even though you don’t use the equipment?
Well, it’s the same with the PageRank on your site. The
more you have flowing on your pages, the more things you can do and the better
you do it, and you certainly don’t want to have less.
Now, you worked very hard to acquire that PageRank, so I
do believe that just like electricity you don’t want part of your work going to
waste either.
What do you think is happening when the PageRank on your
site flows onto pages that you don’t want or don’t need to have indexed in the
search engines?
Aren’t you wasting some of that precious energy that
could be better used on another page?
This is what I’m going to show you in this lesson.
Conserving PageRank
Now that you understand how PageRank flows onto your pages, it’s time to look at
a bigger scale and consider the implications site-wide.
Although not as important as it used to be in the past, the PageRank of a page
is still a determinant factor for your search engine ranking position in Google.
At equal factors, the page with the higher PageRank will
be the one ranking better.
Some hardcore people would recommend to sculpt your site
with Javascript or Flash links as they are unreadable from the search engines
while the rel=”nofollow” attribute control zone is still subjective.
Well honestly, I don’t want my pages to “disappear”
entirely, I just don’t want them to suck out needlessly some of my hard earned
PageRank and this why I favor the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
In recent news, it’s even said that Javascript links are
now readable by Google, I haven’t tested this information yet, so I can’t
guarantee it yet.
I don’t want to talk about the robots.txt here, as it’s
really an overly powerful tool for beginners and any misuse could backfire on
you in ways you can’t imagine.
So from this point on, I’m referring to Google rel=”nofollow”
to do site sculpting.
What Links Should You Preserve?
I initially wanted to start with the links you should sculpt but I changed my
mind and think it’s better to start with the links you shouldn’t sculpt! That’s
easy:
1. Do not touch any navigation link at all!
Messing up with your navigation links if you don’t fully
know or understand what you are doing is the best way to destroy your site.
2. In addition, I would recommend you to take extra care
and precaution with links that points towards a page that itself links towards
other pages.
What Links Should You Sculpt?
Obviously, the links you should sculpt are the one that won’t affect what’s
happening on your site and your search engine ranking position if they
“disappear”…
As a general rule, the following types of pages can be
safely nofollowed. (Please double check carefully on your site nonetheless)
• About
• Contact
• Shopping Cart
• Privacy Pages
• Disclaimer
You’d be surprised as to how many e-commerce sites have a
Shopping Cart with a PR3-4, what a waste of resources!
Exercise
Depending on your background, and assuming that you don’t have a site yet,
(after all, we are still designing our site structure) add to your sitemap
design which page should be nofollowed.
All of this will ensure that by the time you will need to design your site or
hire a web designer, nothing is left to chance, and you’ll get a site readily
optimize, rather than having to make changes over and over.
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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